The mission of Strixhaven University is to discover and preserve magical knowledge, to disseminate that knowledge from one generation to the next, to promote free and open study of magic in all its forms, and to enhance the lives of people throughout the world through the use of magic.
A magical world boasts many places where students can study magic and many sages who take eager learners under their wings. But being accepted to Strixhaven University is a special honor, the dream of many young students. Strixhaven is a place of enlightenment and learning, and both its graduates and its delegates are typically welcomed and respected wherever they go.
Founded seven centuries ago by five ancient dragons, Strixhaven is the premier institution of magical learning, drawing promising young mages from all over. Each equipped with its own campus and faculty, Strixhaven's five colleges—summarized in the Colleges of Strixhaven table—cover a vast array of academic and magical specialties.
As a Strixhaven student, you start with a well-rounded education in a rigorous first-year program. In your second year, you choose your preferred specialty at one of the five colleges. You can also partake in a vibrant campus life, with plenty of clubs and other activities. You might even play on one of Strixhaven's prestigious Mage Tower teams and bask in the adoration of cheering crowds!
| College | Description |
|---|---|
| Lorehold | Explores the past and preserves its lessons for future generations. Also called the College of Archaeomancy. |
| Prismari | Uses the elements to practice the arts. Also called the College of Elemental Arts. |
| Quandrix | Focuses on the mathematics of nature. Also called the College of Numeromancy. |
| Silverquill | Teaches the magic of rhetoric, poetry, oration, and writing. Also called the College of Eloquence. |
| Witherbloom | Harnesses the forces of life and death. Also called the College of Essence Studies. |
About This Book
This book is your guide to life at Strixhaven in Dungeons & Dragons—an introduction to the university, a guide to creating student characters there, a campaign, and a collection of friends and foes.
1 gives an overview of life and study at Strixhaven. It introduces the main features of the central campus and each of the five colleges.
2 is your guide to creating a student character. It introduces the owlin race and five backgrounds—one for each college—as well as a collection of feats, spells, and magic items.
0–0 provide a campaign meant to advance characters from 1st to 10th level as they progress through their magical studies. Each chapter covers a year's worth of adventure, so characters begin 3 as 1st-level characters and first-year students and begin 0 at the start of their fourth year of studies (at around 8th level). Chapter 3 includes an overview of the adventures and the overall campaign arc as well as special rules for aspects of campus life: exams, relationships, extracurriculars, and jobs.
8 is a collection of stat blocks for students, faculty, and various creatures on and around the Strixhaven campus. Whether student adventurers get caught up in a duel with their rivals or face a dreaded mage hunter, the stat blocks in this chapter give you the information you need to resolve the situation.
Orientation
The following subsections present three important facts to keep in mind as you explore these pages and prepare to play or run the book's campaign.
Strixhaven Is a University
This book's campaign assumes that the player characters are students at Strixhaven University. Even as they get caught up in the adventures, the characters have to continue going to class, doing homework, and studying for exams. Optional rules in 3 reinforce the importance of study in the adventures.
The characters are also subject to the authority of the university's faculty and staff members. Circumstances will at times cause player characters to defy faculty authority—and even deans—during their adventures, and the threat of detention or even expulsion might hang over their head.
Finally, student characters are part of a school community. They live in university housing, eat in dining halls, and spend the majority of their time on campus. They eat, sleep, study, socialize, and adventure as part of a community of students, faculty, and staff. The school is like a town, where a relatively small cast of characters can play significant roles over the course of the campaign.
It's an Academy of Mages
Study at Strixhaven isn't about learning to be a wizard but about learning to be a historian, an artist, an orator, a scientist, or some other profession—while using magic to enhance one's studies. The university's understanding of magic is expansive. Characters of any class can study at Strixhaven, whether they're full-fledged spellcasters like wizards, clerics, and druids; they manage a spell or two thanks to a subclass or feat; or they manifest magical abilities that aren't even spells. (For example, a barbarian who follows the Path of the Ancestral Guardian, described in Xanathar's Guide to Everything, can excel in studying history at Lorehold College by virtue of their connection to an ancestral spirit.)
Magic is everywhere on campus. The campus culture encourages finding magical solutions to the most mundane problems, and if characters need access to a spell they can't cast, they have a strong chance of finding someone who can cast it.
It's Cosmopolitan
Strixhaven draws students and faculty from across the world and from other realms in the multiverse. The university's students and faculty are united by a desire to learn and include humans, elves, dwarves, owlin (described in 2), orcs, trolls, vampires, and studious folk of many other origins.
In practical terms, for player characters, you can use the rules found in any D&D book to select a character's race, if the DM approves. For nonplayer characters, you're as likely to meet a pixie, a dryad, a giant, a treant, or another fantastical creature on campus as you are to meet a Humanoid. The faculty members mentioned in 1 include genasi, tritons, and even a bipedal brown bear.
To the faculty and students of Strixhaven, it is unremarkable to meet someone who hails from a far-off land, since almost everyone on campus is from somewhere else. Strixhaven has a place for anyone who is dedicated to magic-enhanced study.
Strixhaven's World
Strixhaven bills itself as "the premier institution of magical learning in the world," but the question that raises for your campaign is this—which world?
In the multiverse of the Magic: The Gathering Trading Card Game, Strixhaven is located on a world called Arcavios, which (according to legend) formed from the collision or merging of two other worlds. It is situated in the northeastern portion of a continent called Orrithia, also known as the Vastlands, which is populated by a tremendous variety of peoples.
For the purposes of D&D, though, you can place Strixhaven wherever it best fits the needs of your campaign. It could be in a world of your own creation, in a published D&D setting (such as the Forgotten Realms or Eberron), in the planar cosmopolis of Sigil, or in an interplanar nexus that allows it to draw students from across the Material Plane or the entire multiverse.
Whatever world you decide to place Strixhaven in, three elements of the wider world of Arcavios might have some impact on adventures in the school.
Snarls and Star Arches
As described in the Player's Handbook, magic suffuses all existence in the worlds of D&D. In the Forgotten Realms, scholars describe the fabric of magic as a Weave that allows spellcasters to interact with the world's underlying magical reality. In Arcavios, that fabric is knotted and tangled in some locations, creating a phenomenon called snarls. At these places, spells can be amplified or distorted in unpredictable ways. This phenomenon matters for Strixhaven because a luminous snarl is situated at the very heart of campus, located in the Hall of Oracles in the university's monumental library, the Biblioplex.
Similarly, gravity-defying arch shapes appear throughout the world of Arcavios and, in particular, tower over the Biblioplex. These star arches are made from spokes of natural materials that float in an arch shape, with a precise inner curve and a rough and irregular outer arch. They can stand straight or lie at an angle, and they can be small or enormous, whole or broken, grown over or mysteriously clean. Their irregular spokes evoke the radiating lines of a shining star.
The star arches are a mystery left over from the birth of the world. In most cases, the arches simply float inexplicably—silent, immovable, and inert. But many people report seeing an arch appear to them at a critical juncture in their lives, helping them understand a lesson or answer a burning question in their mind. Some scholars believe each arch marks a place of great magic, such as the site of a great mage's birth or the location of a time-lost spell. Other folk believe these arches are connected with the archaics in some way (see "0" below). Some students have even seen an arch come to life with magic in an archaic's presence.
Both snarls and star arches are subjects of magical research for students and faculty at Strixhaven, who also study wild and dead magic zones, floating earth motes, and other weird locales.
Founder Dragons
Strixhaven University was founded by five ancient dragons who, according to legend, hatched from the magical energy of the newborn world of Arcavios. These Founder Dragons were among the first to master magic, and they realized that only through disciplined study would magic be safe in the hands of other peoples. They founded Strixhaven to facilitate that study and established the five colleges based on the magic that each dragon mastered, as summarized in the Founder Dragons table.
To this day, the Founder Dragons roam the world. They no longer associate directly with Strixhaven, preferring to let the deans of the colleges speak in their stead. The dragons' knowledge is vast, but their tempers can prove short. Mages seek them out only to learn the most elusive secrets. The dragons' stat blocks are presented in 8.
| College | Founder |
|---|---|
| Lorehold | Velomachus Lorehold |
| Prismari | Galazeth Prismari |
| Quandrix | Tanazir Quandrix |
| Silverquill | Shadrix Silverquill |
| Witherbloom | Beledros Witherbloom |
Archaics and the Oracle
The Oracle of Strixhaven is the wisest and most accomplished mage in the world of Arcavios, selected by the Founder Dragons. The Oracle's lifelong task is to ensure that magic is used to help people and not twisted to evil ends. To be the Oracle, one must understand fundamental truths about the nature of magic, know and wield hundreds of spells, and possess impeccable judgment and virtue.
Mysteriously linked to the Oracle, archaics are wise, giant, long-lived beings with an innate talent for magic. They can be seen striding through the wilds, exploring sources of magic with their many arms or contemplating existence through their "eye," which functions as a magical focus of some kind. Scholars seek out archaics for their vast knowledge of history and magic, but archaics tend to communicate in obscure allusions and cryptic metaphors.
Few know that archaics' existence is linked to a time-warping phenomenon involving the Oracle. When an Oracle dies, their mind and spirit is swept off to the distant past, drawn backward through time toward the intense magical power that brought the world into being. Splinters of that Oracle's soul and its fragmented memories coalesce into a creature—a newborn archaic. Every archaic alive today was born at the dawn of time from the mind of someone who has lived and died (or who will one day live and die) as an Oracle. Archaics speak in cryptic allegories not only to tease and test the eager minds of young mages, but also to cleverly sidestep time paradoxes.
Stat blocks for archaics appear in 8, alongside that of the current Oracle, whose name is Jadzi.