I own the Strixhaven book but I am not a fan of it. It isn't really the style of game I like playing. But I have bought the book, and I don't want my money to go to waste, so I am trying to think of ways to use it. One idea came into my head, what if the Candlekeep mysteries book was combined with the Strixhaven book? Would this work? I have not read all the adventures in Candlekeep, but I like most of the ones I have read. So, would it be a good idea to combine the books, running whichever adventures seem coolest from both sources, and using Strixhaven as the setting? How would one do this?
I ran a Strixhaven game with sidequests from Candlekeep (and some homebrew). The way I did it lorewise was that "The Candlekeep" was the students' nickname for Strixhaven's Active Experimental Archive-- basically the place they store all the stuff too sensitive and/or dangerous for the regular library, and also houses volatile ongoing experiments. It's like an annex to the main library that you need permission to access.
So far I'd only run The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, but yeah it works pretty well!
The ones I thought would work best with the Strixhaven setting were:
-the Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, which the players can discover accidentally or while researching demiplanes, pocket dimensions, or permanent versions of spells. Instead of the guy dying, I just had him get trapped outside the demiplane, while the imp stayed in and followed the players (otherwise the tone of the campaign would've got real dark quickly).
-Mazfroth's Mighty Digressions, which you can leave mostly alone and just have the town be the city the school is in, the party just needs to go off campus-- you can have them discover this one by researching the nature of magic, lycanthropy, and demons, OR you could just have books start attacking students to kick it off.
-Shemshimes Bedtime Rhyme, this one is also largely the same, with the party getting infected by an active experiment in the Candlekeep archive and having to be quarantined inside.
-Book of Cylinders, can be largely left unchanged, the plot hook can just have a gripli student approach the party like "hey things are going on back home and can you help this weekend??" cause by then the party will have a reputation in the school.
-Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion, this one, instead of cultists, it's an extremely ambitious student prank lead by a zealous student who believes certain knowledge should not be available to the student body at large. Instead of the quest giver dying of old age too, they get cold feet and a curse by the leader turns him into a farm animal if he tries to tell anyone about the plan, and the party has the secondary goal of lifting the curse and turning them back.
-Zikran's Zephyrean Tome, again this one can be left mostly unchanged, kicking off if the students need to research the inner planes, wind dukes of Aqua, djinn, interplanar travel, or magical fortresses.
They all can tie in around the main quest as side quests and b plots, so you can present multiple plot hooks to a party at once and they don't necessarily have to go for all of them every time.
Thanks, that is helpful. I will definitely use this.
I think I would try to change the feel of Strixhaven. I dislike that the majority of the first part is spent with pranks and silly student stuff. I don't make my characters like that, most characters I have would not go on risky adventures to pull off a silly prank. I would create a character who is there to study and learn. I would try to change it so that studious scholars go to Strixhaven to learn valuable secrets or they are in search of hidden answers. I like funny games, but I dislike how ridiculous your characters have to be to work in the Strixhaven world.
Also, there is another problem. I am pretty sure I read somewhere in the book that if a NPC dies, the party has to pay for them to be resurrected. Won't this happen to the party if they die? So death isn't a threat in the world? I don't like that. If the characters die, it should be serious. Maybe they could go on a full quest to resurrect their fallen comrade, but if they cause the death of a NPC, it shouldn't just be a fine and they are expelled. Is there a way to make it so that Death is a threat and a serious consequence? I know it is problematic because this is supposed to be a school of magic, they should have access to the spell, but it takes away a feel of danger for me.
I never heard the death thing, but you can handle it forever you want in your game. Honestly I've been dm-ing for close to 7 years and have never had a player death, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
As far as the hijinks in the main story goes, I get that. You could always move into a more intrigue-focused story with little modification. Like for the quest where you break into one of the faculty buildings to steal that doll, maybe instead of a doll you're after, maybe it's evidence that one of the teachers is secretly a bad guy, or evidence that one of the students isn't who they say they are. Maybe someone is Murgaxor's secret apprentice or something and the players get a hint about it that leads into the mission.
I wouldn't fully discount hijinks though. Just because you would prefer to play a more serious character doesn't necessarily mean that *all* of your players agree, and I think zany hijinks to a certain extent are part of the magic school genre. People expect, when playing younger adults in a school setting, that a certain amount of age-appropriate trickery is going to take place and fuel student rivalries, etc. I wouldn't seriously lean away from hijinks unless I was considering aging up the campaign from like a magical college to a magical grad school.
I do agree you'll need to add stuff to flesh out the campaign into a real story, as I like to think about the story in the book as more of the skeleton of a campaign. Here's a list of several things, aside from the Candlekeep adventures, that I added to my game (some of which the players have discovered b some they have not):
Murgaxor: I added Murgaxor as an npc with the faculty as the lab supervisor. He's a disgraced former teacher who was demoted to that position after an experiment gone wrong, and he holds a grudge. He's paranoid, always muttering under his breath, and very dramatic, and I gave him a silly voice. My players loved him, and there was actually tension when they found out he was a villain. He fled the school after the players discovered his secret at the end of their first year (I actually wrote out partial journal entries in his voice so they could actually come to that conclusion rather than me just telling them "it's an evil journal").
Possessed Paper: one of the party members joined the school paper, so I included a side plot about the ghost of a vindictive former editor who's possessing the printing press to magically publish attack articles slandering the children of the ones he holds responsible for his death, in an effort to turn the school against them.
Spite Harrowdale: one of the party members' roommate is Spite Harrowdale (from Dungeon of the Mad Mage, Dweomercore), who is a powerful evil archmage under cover in the body of a 17 year old, searching the school for an ancient lost power (I'm thinking maybe an army of draconians interred under the school). He has his pet oni that is disguised as a raven, and so far that player has found a raven feather in his trunk, implying that Spite has been looking through his stuff.
Antagonistic npc's: all the fellow students in the book are too nice, so I also took the liberty of adding some antagonistic ones to even the odds. There's a mean girl, a rich kid, some cronies, etc.
The military: one of the faculty is a government liason to the school for the kingdom of Orrithia, who despite Strixhaven's neutrality, is using his position to pressure certain students into studying weapons technology for use in Orrirhia's military. Students with a penchant for blowing stuff up (like the artilliarist in my party) he takes aside and offers grant money towards their final research project, as long as it's something the military can use. This is technically allowed by the school's charter, but highly frowned on.
Those are a few of the plots and subplots I added in to flesh things out a little more.
Thanks again, those are some good ideas. I especially like the idea of including Murgaxor as a lab supervisor and those changes on the doll quest. That one especially bothered me.
I do know that most of my players wouldn't mind playing funny characters, so I won't take away the ability to perform hijinks, but I will change it some so that they don't have to be ridiculous characters in order to go along with the story.
I own the Strixhaven book but I am not a fan of it. It isn't really the style of game I like playing. But I have bought the book, and I don't want my money to go to waste, so I am trying to think of ways to use it. One idea came into my head, what if the Candlekeep mysteries book was combined with the Strixhaven book? Would this work? I have not read all the adventures in Candlekeep, but I like most of the ones I have read. So, would it be a good idea to combine the books, running whichever adventures seem coolest from both sources, and using Strixhaven as the setting? How would one do this?
I ran a Strixhaven game with sidequests from Candlekeep (and some homebrew). The way I did it lorewise was that "The Candlekeep" was the students' nickname for Strixhaven's Active Experimental Archive-- basically the place they store all the stuff too sensitive and/or dangerous for the regular library, and also houses volatile ongoing experiments. It's like an annex to the main library that you need permission to access.
So far I'd only run The Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, but yeah it works pretty well!
The ones I thought would work best with the Strixhaven setting were:
-the Joy of Extradimensional Spaces, which the players can discover accidentally or while researching demiplanes, pocket dimensions, or permanent versions of spells. Instead of the guy dying, I just had him get trapped outside the demiplane, while the imp stayed in and followed the players (otherwise the tone of the campaign would've got real dark quickly).
-Mazfroth's Mighty Digressions, which you can leave mostly alone and just have the town be the city the school is in, the party just needs to go off campus-- you can have them discover this one by researching the nature of magic, lycanthropy, and demons, OR you could just have books start attacking students to kick it off.
-Shemshimes Bedtime Rhyme, this one is also largely the same, with the party getting infected by an active experiment in the Candlekeep archive and having to be quarantined inside.
-Book of Cylinders, can be largely left unchanged, the plot hook can just have a gripli student approach the party like "hey things are going on back home and can you help this weekend??" cause by then the party will have a reputation in the school.
-Kandlekeep Dekonstruktion, this one, instead of cultists, it's an extremely ambitious student prank lead by a zealous student who believes certain knowledge should not be available to the student body at large. Instead of the quest giver dying of old age too, they get cold feet and a curse by the leader turns him into a farm animal if he tries to tell anyone about the plan, and the party has the secondary goal of lifting the curse and turning them back.
-Zikran's Zephyrean Tome, again this one can be left mostly unchanged, kicking off if the students need to research the inner planes, wind dukes of Aqua, djinn, interplanar travel, or magical fortresses.
They all can tie in around the main quest as side quests and b plots, so you can present multiple plot hooks to a party at once and they don't necessarily have to go for all of them every time.
Thanks, that is helpful. I will definitely use this.
I think I would try to change the feel of Strixhaven. I dislike that the majority of the first part is spent with pranks and silly student stuff. I don't make my characters like that, most characters I have would not go on risky adventures to pull off a silly prank. I would create a character who is there to study and learn. I would try to change it so that studious scholars go to Strixhaven to learn valuable secrets or they are in search of hidden answers. I like funny games, but I dislike how ridiculous your characters have to be to work in the Strixhaven world.
Also, there is another problem. I am pretty sure I read somewhere in the book that if a NPC dies, the party has to pay for them to be resurrected. Won't this happen to the party if they die? So death isn't a threat in the world? I don't like that. If the characters die, it should be serious. Maybe they could go on a full quest to resurrect their fallen comrade, but if they cause the death of a NPC, it shouldn't just be a fine and they are expelled. Is there a way to make it so that Death is a threat and a serious consequence? I know it is problematic because this is supposed to be a school of magic, they should have access to the spell, but it takes away a feel of danger for me.
I never heard the death thing, but you can handle it forever you want in your game. Honestly I've been dm-ing for close to 7 years and have never had a player death, so I wouldn't worry too much about it.
As far as the hijinks in the main story goes, I get that. You could always move into a more intrigue-focused story with little modification. Like for the quest where you break into one of the faculty buildings to steal that doll, maybe instead of a doll you're after, maybe it's evidence that one of the teachers is secretly a bad guy, or evidence that one of the students isn't who they say they are. Maybe someone is Murgaxor's secret apprentice or something and the players get a hint about it that leads into the mission.
I wouldn't fully discount hijinks though. Just because you would prefer to play a more serious character doesn't necessarily mean that *all* of your players agree, and I think zany hijinks to a certain extent are part of the magic school genre. People expect, when playing younger adults in a school setting, that a certain amount of age-appropriate trickery is going to take place and fuel student rivalries, etc. I wouldn't seriously lean away from hijinks unless I was considering aging up the campaign from like a magical college to a magical grad school.
I do agree you'll need to add stuff to flesh out the campaign into a real story, as I like to think about the story in the book as more of the skeleton of a campaign. Here's a list of several things, aside from the Candlekeep adventures, that I added to my game (some of which the players have discovered b some they have not):
Those are a few of the plots and subplots I added in to flesh things out a little more.
Thanks again, those are some good ideas. I especially like the idea of including Murgaxor as a lab supervisor and those changes on the doll quest. That one especially bothered me.
I do know that most of my players wouldn't mind playing funny characters, so I won't take away the ability to perform hijinks, but I will change it some so that they don't have to be ridiculous characters in order to go along with the story.