 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappy and it's time to venture into a magical world of witchcraft and wizardry with the new official D&D book, Strixhaven, a curriculum of chaos. I'm gonna talk all about what's inside this book, whether you should buy it, and how best to cope with the fact that talking about the book slash movie series that you based your personality on as a child is now the millennial equivalent to boomers buying crystals. As always, keep in mind that the majority of this is just my opinion, so if you feel that creating an entire dorm for people who are likely to turn evil, and then putting one fourth of your students into it based on a personality test that they take at the ripe old age of 11 is a good idea, then feel free to play your games however you want. But with that out of the way, let's begin. So, one thing we have to get out of the way is that Strixhaven is not a sourcebook. It's not even half a sourcebook, it's 40 pages of sourcebook, and then the rest of it is a collection of four adventures that take you through all four years of college. Complete with a report card for you to fill out so that you can be reminded of your terrible teenage years. If you're thinking about buying this book because it'll be filled with rules for role-playing a magical school, then you'll be half disappointed, but also kind of happy anyway. There are a lot of weird mechanics like the aforementioned report card that are unique to the Strixhaven adventures, and you can gut whatever you'd like from this book and put it into your own story if you find something that you like. If you're looking for a bunch of new races in classes, though, do not look here. Strixhaven comes with one new race in the form of the Owlid, and there are no new subclasses to speak of, only five backgrounds based off of the five casting colleges of Strixhaven. For those of you who don't keep up with the current events of your favorite dice game, this wasn't the plan. A while back Wizards put out an unearthed arcana for the five colleges, which you can find a video of me talking about here, and the gimmick was supposed to be that each subclass could be taken by multiple different main classes, such as Witherbloom, being for both Druids and Warlocks. Based on the fact that the MTG cards for creatures from specific schools like the Deans of Witherbloom were also a Druid and a Warlock, it seems like Wizards was really gung-ho on the idea. Unfortunately, the UA wasn't received well. People thought that the subclasses were way too generic because they couldn't take advantage of a class's specific playstyle, and while I personally saw potential in the concept, I had to agree that most of it felt stale, as did begrudgingly Wizards of the Coast, which leads us now to a book with no subclasses whatsoever, just some fancy backgrounds. But since the majority of people are here to add to their OC collection, let's start with the new Owl Race, which, like other recent animal races, can choose whether to be medium or small-sized. They also get superior darkvision, proficiency in stealth, and the ability to fly whenever they want, so long as they aren't wearing medium or heavy armor. As far as Owl Races go, yep, this is definitely an Owl. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but they sure did take all the traits of an Owl and slap them onto a stat block. I will say, despite having only three features, the darkvision is 120 feet, which is twice as long as the normal 60, and Limitless Flight is nothing to scoff at, flying's fun, so what it lacks in variety, it makes up for in having abilities that are stronger than the average bear or bird. As for the Strixhaven College backgrounds, they're weird as hell. Each one gives you a couple of skills and supplies, like a good background, but instead of giving you a background feature, every background gives you the Strixhaven Initiate Feet at level 1, so long as you select the school that your background is tied to. For a better understanding of what I'm talking about, let's break down the Strixhaven Initiate, which is Wiz's answer to the multiple colleges after their new subclass idea blew up in their face. So there are only two feats in this game, Strixhaven Initiate and Strixhaven Mascot, which requires Initiate to be taken first, and that lets you summon a buddy to help you in a fight. Strixhaven Initiate, however, has you pick one of the five colleges, then it gives you two cantrips and a first level spell that you can choose out of a list provided by said college. Combined with the college background, you'll soar out with a few college specific spells, and just like with Ravnica's backgrounds, if you're playing a spellcaster, you'll also get a bunch of new spells added to your spell list as you level up. This is very underwhelming for me. In a bubble, I like spellcasting backgrounds, and I especially like feats that let you cast new spells, but as a trade-off for subclasses, I'm feeling like there should be more here. Like, if I pick a wizard and I take this feat background combo, then I'll get two new cantrips, a new spell, a couple of optional spells added to my spell list, but then I'm just a normal wizard. I don't have to take the background spells, and even if I do, it's only paying lip service to the idea of me learning new spells from school, because it's giving me spells that I've seen plenty of times before. And if you're a non-caster, get fucked! You get three spells, and you can go cry about being a muggle. Hell, even if you're a half-caster, you're now forced to roleplay the character that isn't very good at wizard school. It's baffling to me, because here, in this book, they also created the first feat that requires a certain level with a Strixhaven mascot. I went and checked. Other feats have all kinds of pre-rex, but never level restrictions. What I'm getting at here is if they're not gonna create subclasses that branch between multiple classes, why not make multiple feats for each school? Just name them wither bloom initiate, scholar, master, whatever. That give new spells and features to make it feel like you're gaining ancient knowledge from a powerful institution, and you can put a level check on them to make sure that classes like the fighter or rogue don't breeze past the other classes with their extra feats. Speaking of fighters, making every school into a feat ladder would mean that non-casting classes can still participate in ways outside of being the school janitor. I know that a lot of people were worried that half of their favorite classes were going to feel excluded, and I'm not gonna lie, this book doesn't do anything to help that outside of saying, yeah, play your non-caster and just say that your features are magic, which is a duct tape and glue solution that works when you're home brewing things for a table and don't want to go through the effort, but it doesn't work when you're the world's greatest role-playing game. Alright, rant over. The rest of this book takes place as an adventure, and while I have not played this adventure, because I'm scrambling to get this video out after Wizards didn't send me a pre-release copy, I have ran plenty of pre-made, so I can see with my specialized what lurks beneath these pages. The gist of this adventure is that you and your friends are new students at Strixhaven's college campus and are living the dorm life as you make friends, learn magic, and uncover a secret plot that threatens the school. Calling it one adventure is sort of wrong because it's technically broken up into four different adventures that represent the four years of college, but the book expects you to run them as one continuous campaign, so I do too. The overall campaign takes you from levels 1 through 10, and there's a heavy focus on social role-playing, to the point where the game comes with these Strixhaven memory cards that you can use to keep track of your progress throughout the school years, letting you live out the fantasy of getting good grades, holding down a job, and having friends. There's also a bunch of extracurricular activities your character can opt into, and one of those activities is LARPing, which for some reason gives you a bonus to animal handling, so I don't know what LARP those guys are going to, because if I bring my horse on field, they'll tell me to leave before it eats all the heraldry. Unlike previous adventures like Wild Beyond the Witchlight, Strixhaven doesn't position itself as a combat optional adventure, despite having a big emphasis on being an early 2000s high school movie. Moreover, the game splits the social combat and exploration pillars up like most adventures, but it makes a huge spectacle of the social encounters, and it puts a lot of effort into making the school seem like a cool place to hang out in. And because the different adventures take place over large stretches of time, as a means of progressing the year, there's plenty of downtime, and you usually spend that time doing stuff on your Strixhaven memories, especially forging relationships. There's an entire section dedicated to turning portions of this adventure into a dating sim, with an entire catalogue of befriendable and romanceable NPCs, and they even credit Monster Prom as one of their inspirations, which would explain characters like this. Look at that tug. These relationships give you benefits and negatives related to how many friends and enemies you make, and you even get inspiration if you get deep enough into a relationship. Giggity. Overall, should you buy Strixhaven as an adventure? Yeah, it's fun. It's quirky. The story is very Harry Potter, and it makes you feel like you're in a high school anime. Just don't pick this up thinking that it's a sourcebook, no matter what D&D Beyond tells you, because you will be disappointed by the lack of options. The backgrounds and feats work within the framework of the school adventures, but not really anywhere else, and it feels like the developers were screwed by fan backlash and didn't know how to recover. Still, I'll probably end up picking this book up and make a bunch of references to wicked songs while I fondly remember the times when I didn't have to pay taxes. Buuuut that'll about 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 to pay my student loans. But yeah, Davi out.