I’ve been considering running Strixhaven for a couple friends and after an interaction on twitter, I think it might be fun to inject some Mean Girls into the module. My one friend is very into the idea, and I think the others will be, too, but I’m a bit nervous about DMing.
Obviously not recreating the movie, but looking to kind of emulate the classic highschool movies just a little bit, like Mean Girls, Easy A, Breakfast Club, Clueless, etc, so I’m looking for ideas to help me get started. I’m not able to read the WHOLE book before starting, but I’ve read enough of the beginning of each year to have an idea of what’s going on.
Ideas so far:
PCs will either be a group of mean girls, or an unlikely friend group of various highschool stereotypes (goth, jock, popular girl, etc), I think I’ll leave that choice to them
The 5 rumours about each PC that will be occasionally slipped to fellow PCs: 2 good, 2 bad, 1 false, or some variation of that
A previously popular student instead of Murgaxor, aiming to secure eternal youth and beauty (I’m still going to refer to them as Murgaxor)
should the Oriq.. Oriqs? be changed?
Possibly some rival students are working for Murgaxor and use some “Mean Girl” tactics to distract PCs or get them in trouble once they see the group as a threat
I don’t have backstories for PCs yet, but ofc I’d like to work those in somehow - will probably encourage players to have someone from their backstory connected to Strixhaven, a fellow student, staff, alumni, etc (If there’s a PC of a long living race, their parent or relative might have gone to school with Murgaxor)
TLDR: How to make Strixhaven more like Mean Girls/a highschool movie
When I think of high school movie plots, I definitely think your campaign should center around the winter formal (or whatever you wanna call the big dance everyone is looking forward to). Everyone is jockeying for popularity leading up to the event, alliances or feuds are forming between various cliques, students are figuring out how to ask out their crush before their rival manages to, and obviously people are questing after the perfect outfit (or maybe having their fashion plans sabotaged!) Then when you run the dance, you can have all these tensions come to a head with all that drama, Murgaxor's big evil reveal, and maybe a fight.
I definitely think a rival party where each character acts as a mirror or foil for the player characters would work really well in this kind of character-interaction-focused campaign.
I love the idea of Murgaxor as a mean girl student. I think the biggest failing of the actual adventure is not including him before you find his journal, so when I ran Strixhaven I had him be the paranoid, kooky faculty advisor to the lab (having been demoted from being a professor), always ranting in a silly voice. I think I made him so overtly suspicious and silly that I convinced the players he was all talk, and nobody suspected him at all during the first year. Made for a great reveal when they discovered the journal (which I actually wrote journal entries for, since that's another thing the book drops the ball on).
I’ve been considering running Strixhaven for a couple friends and after an interaction on twitter, I think it might be fun to inject some Mean Girls into the module. My one friend is very into the idea, and I think the others will be, too, but I’m a bit nervous about DMing.
Obviously not recreating the movie, but looking to kind of emulate the classic highschool movies just a little bit, like Mean Girls, Easy A, Breakfast Club, Clueless, etc, so I’m looking for ideas to help me get started. I’m not able to read the WHOLE book before starting, but I’ve read enough of the beginning of each year to have an idea of what’s going on.
Ideas so far:
TLDR: How to make Strixhaven more like Mean Girls/a highschool movie
When I think of high school movie plots, I definitely think your campaign should center around the winter formal (or whatever you wanna call the big dance everyone is looking forward to). Everyone is jockeying for popularity leading up to the event, alliances or feuds are forming between various cliques, students are figuring out how to ask out their crush before their rival manages to, and obviously people are questing after the perfect outfit (or maybe having their fashion plans sabotaged!) Then when you run the dance, you can have all these tensions come to a head with all that drama, Murgaxor's big evil reveal, and maybe a fight.
I definitely think a rival party where each character acts as a mirror or foil for the player characters would work really well in this kind of character-interaction-focused campaign.
I love the idea of Murgaxor as a mean girl student. I think the biggest failing of the actual adventure is not including him before you find his journal, so when I ran Strixhaven I had him be the paranoid, kooky faculty advisor to the lab (having been demoted from being a professor), always ranting in a silly voice. I think I made him so overtly suspicious and silly that I convinced the players he was all talk, and nobody suspected him at all during the first year. Made for a great reveal when they discovered the journal (which I actually wrote journal entries for, since that's another thing the book drops the ball on).
Good luck!
This is a great idea!
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