Usually your foes at college are bullies, imply academics, and homework deadlines. But once you’re a pupil in Dungeons & Dragons, and the varsity is a magical crossover with the world of Magic: The Gathering, harmful encounters are going to get a bit more durable to face than a paper written an hour earlier than it’s due.

io9’s received your look inside the subsequent sourcebook for D&D, Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. The newest crossover between the tabletop’s fifth version and Wizards of the Coast’s different smash hit fantasy recreation, Magic: The Gathering, Curriculum of Chaos whisks gamers away to the titular faculty for would-be mages from the Magic card set launched earlier this 12 months. Alongside asking gamers to steadiness the pains of magically educational life, like choosing the proper faculty of magic for you, or attending lessons and social occasions, Curriculum of Chaos remains to be a D&D sourcebook, which implies there’s going to be loads of methods so that you can put your research into sensible software by… throwing a cantrip or seven at them. Or, y’know, bludgeoning them a bit for those who’re one in all Strixhaven’s not-so-magically-inclined college students.

“Strixhaven had several elements that we felt made for a perfect D&D setting. First of all, it’s a university, and we loved the idea of telling stories for characters who are coming into their abilities and their personalities as people in such a cosmopolitan and academic environment,” Amanda Hamon, Senior D&D Designer and one of many writers on Curriculum of Chaos, instructed io9 over e mail. “We loved the idea of the challenge of creating D&D adventures that take place in an environment where there are exams and extracurriculars, and where lifelong social bonds are being formed. Plus, the setting is a magical college, so characters don’t necessarily need to be mages, but they’re all interested in magic in some way, and that’s a fun twist to put on the stories. The campuses are full of magical creatures in the mascots, and typical student shenanigans are all cloaked in fun and whimsical magic—such as a skate-off contest using magical skates!—so we hope the experiences this book offers are unique.”

Curriculum is way from the primary Magic-meets-D&D crossover in fifth version, however in line with James Wyatt—a author and senior designer who additionally helped form a few of the first tentative official steps to bringing extra Magic into D&D, and vice-versa when the cardboard recreation did Adventures within the Forgotten Realms earlier this 12 months—the groups main concentrate on these sorts of crossovers stays making D&D expertise at first, reasonably than crossing over for crossover’s sake. “I worked on Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, Mythic Odysseys of Theros, Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos, and the Magic set Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, as well as the early Plane Shift articles that started this process of crossing the streams. My biggest takeaway is that, fundamentally, what we are doing is taking worlds created for one game and looking at them through the lens of the other game,” Wyatt instructed io9 over e mail. “We are not engaged in any sort of conversion or translating one game into another. Fundamentally, when D&D players sit down to play D&D, they want to play D&D—not some weird hybrid of D&D rules and Magic mechanics. And the reverse is equally true—and for all the fun we had playing with d20 rolls in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms, that set is still all about expressing the world of the Forgotten Realms through Magic mechanics. So Strixhaven, like the other books before it, is first and foremost a D&D book.”

That means making the sorts of creatures you’d see as summons and spells in a Magic card set like Strixhaven: School of Mages into fully-fledged encounter choices in a recreation of D&D. “The top priority was making sure we could give you a wide variety of fun and interesting stat blocks for the huge variety of students and faculty you’ll find at Strixhaven. Spellcaster NPCs are always tricky for DMs to run and especially to build on their own, so we’ve got casters from every college who really show off the variety of magic used at Strixhaven,” Wyatt added. “I’d say the next priority was the mascot creatures! These critters—inklings, art elementals, fractals, pests, and spirit statues—were an important element of the Magic card set and we had a feeling players would really enjoy interacting with them in the adventures. I’m particularly pleased that we were able to offer a way to use these creatures as familiars, and the adventures include a fun section where you have to interact with all five kinds of mascots. Beyond all that, we had a lot of fun bringing some of the weirder creatures found in the Magic set to life as D&D monsters, including things like groffs and trudges found in the bayou of the Witherbloom campus, the terrifying daemogoths, and powerful figures like the Oracle, the founder dragons, and the archaics.” Check out a couple of or the creatures you’’ll discover in Curriculum of Chaos under, making their debut right here on io9!

One significantly intriguing foe right here isn’t a creature, however a extra insidious menace to Strixhaven college students—the Oriq recruiter, an agent of a secret group of darkish mages who can lure your heroes into working to their sinister goals. “I think every good monster design starts with the creature’s story—what role it plays in the world, what you expect it to be able to accomplish in the context of an adventure, and what kind of adventures you might build around it. The beauty of working from an established setting like Strixhaven is that our starting point is outlined in the Magic team’s world guide and elaborated in the actual cards of the set,” Wyatt mentioned of designing the Oriq members for D&D. “So the Oriq are established as this secret society of mages who use ancient, sinister magic in pursuit of evil goals. They’re particularly important at Strixhaven because they like to recruit students who have great potential but don’t necessarily fit in the tidy boxes that bureaucracy loves so much. The Oriq recruiter is a member of this secret society whose purpose is to sneak into Strixhaven (hence their at-will disguise self and Deception skill), and befriend these disaffected students (so they have access to charm person and suggestion as well as Insight and Persuasion skill). That’s a pretty solid starting point, which then we can flesh out with numbers to make an interesting foe that’s pretty easy for the DM to use at the table and work into an adventure.”

You’ll have the ability to encounter these foes and a complete lot extra when Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos hits cabinets on December 7.

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