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<blockquote data-quote="Alzrius" data-source="post: 8676205" data-attributes="member: 8461"><p>The more books in the "Strongholds" series (as I've termed it) I go through, the more I see where these hit the limit of what sort of gaming D&D lends itself toward. I mean, "magic school" is a popular fantasy trope, but it's one that the world's oldest fantasy game – which can be bluntly characterized as "killing things and taking their stuff" – can only awkwardly embrace, at least when it comes to actually gaming that premise.</p><p></p><p>That said, Bruce Cordell's <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17446/College-of-Wizardry-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>College of Wizardry</em></a> is probably as good as it gets.</p><p></p><p>It's certainly not the only time D&D has touched upon the idea of magical institutions where knowledge is sought. Mystara's <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16975/GAZ3-The-Principalities-of-Glantri-Basic?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>GAZ3 The Principalities of Glantri</em></a> showcased that country's Great School of Magic, for instance. The Birthright campaign's Royal College of Sorcery was likewise overviewed in <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16957/The-Book-of-Magecraft-2e?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>The Book of Magecraft</em></a>. And of course, while not <em>quite</em> a school per se, Dragonlance's Towers of High Sorcery had a long pedigree even before the eponymous <a href="https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2940/Towers-of-High-Sorcery-35?affiliate_id=820" target="_blank"><em>Towers of High Sorcery</em></a> sourcebook for D&D 3.5.</p><p></p><p>Of course, mentioning all of those throws into stark relief that there's been a more recent take on this particular idea (i.e. Strixhaven), but I'm not going to talk about it simply because I don't own and haven't read that book. For all I know, it's the apex of bringing "adventures in magic school" to D&D, but I simply couldn't get past how <a href="https://www.cbr.com/dnd-strixhaven-curriculum-of-chaos-sabrina-john-hughes" target="_blank">so much of the marketing</a> for that book <a href="https://www.polygon.com/22580869/dungeons-dragons-strixhaven-curriculum-chaos" target="_blank">seemed to emphasize</a> everything <em>except</em> adventuring. Maybe younger gamers are lured in by the idea of playing characters who study for tests, work at the local coffee shop, and navigate the dating scene, but I like my characters to delve into forgotten tombs, confront the restless dead, and keep an evil god from returning to plague the world!</p><p></p><p>Which brings us nicely back around to what's in this book.</p><p></p><p>The titular college of wizardry is actually called the Arcane Order of Enchantment & Exposition, or just The Arcane Order, for short. It's also called <em>Mathghamhna</em> in the ancient tongue of the people who built the place in a previous age, and who are all gone now. You see, long ago the evil demigod Dargeshaad was close to conquering the world, with only Mathghamhna holding out. When it was finally about to fall, the master of the place used a doomsday spell to summon/create something called the Dragon of Shades, which destroyed Dargeshaad before turning its wrath on the rest of the world, causing a cataclysm before it finally left/dissipated. The world hasn't been the same place since.</p><p></p><p>All of which is a rather epic way of saying that this book doesn't really fit in with any of TSR's established campaign worlds, and probably not with your homebrew, either. Though, of course, there's a big sidebar on pages 8-9 about how to fit this into the published D&D campaign worlds (many of which require almost all of that backstory to be discarded), which makes me wonder if all of the proper names and specific references should have had brackets around them so that you'd known where to fill in the appropriate replacements.</p><p></p><p>Cynical jokes aside, I can appreciate what Bruce Cordell was doing here. Fleshing out what the Arcane Order is and does required giving it a backstory, and keeping it world-neutral meant that he couldn't default to an existing campaign setting. The end result is <em>probably</em> the best that could be reasonably accomplished, since grounding the place with a definite past gives him more to work with and therefore lets him present us with a more complete product.</p><p></p><p>That's one of the differences – quite possibly the single largest difference – between this product and <em>Den of Thieves</em>. That book wanted to be as generic as it could; not only did it have a considerable overview of thieves' guilds in general, but even when it presented its gallery of a sample guild, it kept it focused squarely on the people involved, divorcing them from everything outside of guild activities, let alone providing any sort of history of the campaign world. By contrast, <em>College of Wizardry</em> grounds itself firmly in the specifics and particulars of what it presents. This isn't a book to generate random wizards schools; it's all about Mathghamhna.</p><p></p><p>The result is that this is a <em>location book</em> more than anything else. A poster map and two additional maps inside the covers present the entire school, and considerable pages are given over to charting each and every room of the place. Fun fact: there are only two privies in the entire building, one for the headmaster and one for everyone else (although the latter is actually a communal latrine where apprentices go to dump out everyone's chamber pots; and you thought <em>your</em> primary education was bad!).</p><p></p><p>Likewise, the book overviews fewer NPCs than <em>Den of Thieves</em>, but gives them more depth, with less important characters receiving less information. It's almost amusing how this works: the headmaster and regents who chart the course of the Arcane Order all get full stat blocks, paragraphs of presentation, and sidebars outlining their various secrets and plots. The guild wizards (who are fully-fledged members of the Order) just get names and abbreviated stat blocks. The initiates (i.e. wizards who haven't graduated yet) only get their name, race, sex, class, and level listed. The apprentices (who are all 0-level characters) don't even get that; we're just told how many there are (although two individuals are spotlighted in one of the adventures at the back of the book).</p><p></p><p>The funny thing is how small this makes Mathghamhna seem, since altogether this comprises just over sixty individuals, almost half of which are those nameless and faceless apprentices. Hogwarts and its houses this is clearly not.</p><p></p><p>More notable is how this book keeps nodding its head in the direction of having PCs be students of the Arcane Order, but can't seem to figure out how to make a campaign out of that. For instance, there's a schedule outlining a typical day for apprentice characters, along with a table to see if you're able to successfully shirk your chores and duties, and another table for what happens if you're caught, but none provide experience or anything like that. There <em>is</em> another table which says how, after X number of years, you have an N-percent chance to becoming a level Z wizard, but the header makes it clear that's for NPCs only. I suppose PCs could use it also, but it's hard to see how as anything other than a background generator for, say, your character's age.</p><p></p><p>And yet, the adventures at the end of the book (four of them, for characters of levels 0, 3-6, 4-8, and 8-11) seem to presume that the characters are students of the school. Which, given that it's a school for, you know, wizards only, seems like an invitation for a TPK, not to mention ruling out a lot of races. I'll say it again that I <em>liked</em> racial level limits and class restrictions, but it's notable how many character options are excluded here. Humans, elves, and half-elves can be wizards, but gnomes have to be illusionists, and dwarves and halflings are completely out of the picture. So are most other humanoids, if you're inclined to <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/looking-back-at-the-leatherette-series-phbr-dmgr-hr-and-more.677493/post-8192933" target="_blank">go a little further</a> than the typical PHB races. Really, this works better if you have mid-level wizard PCs who want to join the Order without having gone to school there (which the book outlines how to do).</p><p></p><p>If not, then I suspect that's why the adventures here are all so short. I thought they were outlines, but they might well just be written that way because they know an all-wizard group won't have much in the way of diverse abilities or staying power.</p><p></p><p>Of course, they're likely to at least have an impressive array of magic. Part of what makes Mathghamhna unique is that it has two very special features: the Spellcrux and access to the Language Primeval.</p><p></p><p>Both are, of course, given extensive coverage. The Spellcrux is sort of a magical relay system, which has a bunch of spells cast into it that attuned wizards can then withdraw and cast on the fly, rather than having to prep their spells ahead of time. So basically it makes them into proto-sorcerers, though it should be noted that there are quite a few limits on how much they can make use of this. By contrast, the Language Primeval (aka <em>Aleph</em>) is an expensive nonweapon proficiency (four slots!) that, on a successful check, allows a spellcaster to modify a spell they're casting in some way, such as by extending the duration, making the saving throw tougher, reducing the casting time, etc. Whereas the Spellcrux is a new creation by the Arcane Order, the Language Primeval is a mere fragment of the power from the previous age, with the headmaster searching relentlessly for more of the lost language.</p><p></p><p>That's not all the magic you'll find here, of course. There's quite a few new spells and magic items, making this a valuable resource for cherry-picking if nothing else. While none of these were popular enough that they went mainstream in later editions, there are still several that have some impressive presentations, such as the <em>cowl of darkness</em>, which permanently shades the user's face beneath impenetrable blackness, making him almost blind in bright light but giving him great vision in darkness, or spells like <em>one question</em> (which compels a person to answer a query on a failed save), <em>ESP barricade</em> (a spell to protect against thought-reading magic), and <em>iterative mnemonic negation</em> (a powerful enchantment that wipes spell after spell from a caster's mind).</p><p></p><p>I should mention that Cordell's ability to tie various products together is on full display here. Remember how I said that <em>Den of Thieves</em>, which was written by someone else, isn't connected to any of these books? Well, Cordell fixed that; one of the assassins from that book is explicitly mentioned here (even saying that he's from <em>Den of Thieves</em>), having been hired to kill one of the school's regents. A couple of Dargeshaad's old minions are mentioned in passing, but you might notice that they <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/looking-back-at-the-limited-series-players-option-monstrous-arcana-odyssey-and-more.685207/post-8606734" target="_blank">appear again</a> in <em>Return to the Tomb of Horrors</em> as sentient magic items, as does another NPC from that boxed set: Acemadecian Drake. And of course, Mathghamhna will be mentioned in the next book in this series.</p><p></p><p>Overall, this is a book that oozes flavor, and has a lot of resources to offer (especially if you do some tweaking and tailoring), but it stumbles on the practical implementation. Simply put, there isn't enough here to run a "wizard school campaign" on, even if you have the PCs leave after they graduate to become fully-fledged guild wizards (which happens at 7th level). There are ways around this problem, of course; DMs can always introduce new situations and scenarios for student PCs, and you can even bring in other classes if you exercise some creative thinking (e.g. Mathghamhna has mundane guards on loan from the nearby town that supplies the college; that's an opportunity for a fighter PC), but the book doesn't do enough of the heavy lifting in that regard, instead defaulting to the more typical location book format.</p><p></p><p>But maybe that's for the best. Ultimately, D&D isn't built to be a game about kids in a formal academic setting, and trying to twist it in that direction has always struck me as trying to put a square peg into a round hole. You can do it, but it won't be easy, nor will it be pretty. But that's fine by me: if I have to choose between running errands for upperclassmen, and an orc-infested dungeon, then all I've got to say is...</p><p></p><p>School's out. Forever.</p><p></p><p>[MEDIA=youtube]RjIwvfj8Bnk[/MEDIA]</p><p></p><p><em>Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.</em></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Alzrius, post: 8676205, member: 8461"] The more books in the "Strongholds" series (as I've termed it) I go through, the more I see where these hit the limit of what sort of gaming D&D lends itself toward. I mean, "magic school" is a popular fantasy trope, but it's one that the world's oldest fantasy game – which can be bluntly characterized as "killing things and taking their stuff" – can only awkwardly embrace, at least when it comes to actually gaming that premise. That said, Bruce Cordell's [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/17446/College-of-Wizardry-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]College of Wizardry[/I][/URL] is probably as good as it gets. It's certainly not the only time D&D has touched upon the idea of magical institutions where knowledge is sought. Mystara's [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16975/GAZ3-The-Principalities-of-Glantri-Basic?affiliate_id=820'][I]GAZ3 The Principalities of Glantri[/I][/URL] showcased that country's Great School of Magic, for instance. The Birthright campaign's Royal College of Sorcery was likewise overviewed in [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/16957/The-Book-of-Magecraft-2e?affiliate_id=820'][I]The Book of Magecraft[/I][/URL]. And of course, while not [I]quite[/I] a school per se, Dragonlance's Towers of High Sorcery had a long pedigree even before the eponymous [URL='https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/2940/Towers-of-High-Sorcery-35?affiliate_id=820'][I]Towers of High Sorcery[/I][/URL] sourcebook for D&D 3.5. Of course, mentioning all of those throws into stark relief that there's been a more recent take on this particular idea (i.e. Strixhaven), but I'm not going to talk about it simply because I don't own and haven't read that book. For all I know, it's the apex of bringing "adventures in magic school" to D&D, but I simply couldn't get past how [URL='https://www.cbr.com/dnd-strixhaven-curriculum-of-chaos-sabrina-john-hughes']so much of the marketing[/URL] for that book [URL='https://www.polygon.com/22580869/dungeons-dragons-strixhaven-curriculum-chaos']seemed to emphasize[/URL] everything [I]except[/I] adventuring. Maybe younger gamers are lured in by the idea of playing characters who study for tests, work at the local coffee shop, and navigate the dating scene, but I like my characters to delve into forgotten tombs, confront the restless dead, and keep an evil god from returning to plague the world! Which brings us nicely back around to what's in this book. The titular college of wizardry is actually called the Arcane Order of Enchantment & Exposition, or just The Arcane Order, for short. It's also called [I]Mathghamhna[/I] in the ancient tongue of the people who built the place in a previous age, and who are all gone now. You see, long ago the evil demigod Dargeshaad was close to conquering the world, with only Mathghamhna holding out. When it was finally about to fall, the master of the place used a doomsday spell to summon/create something called the Dragon of Shades, which destroyed Dargeshaad before turning its wrath on the rest of the world, causing a cataclysm before it finally left/dissipated. The world hasn't been the same place since. All of which is a rather epic way of saying that this book doesn't really fit in with any of TSR's established campaign worlds, and probably not with your homebrew, either. Though, of course, there's a big sidebar on pages 8-9 about how to fit this into the published D&D campaign worlds (many of which require almost all of that backstory to be discarded), which makes me wonder if all of the proper names and specific references should have had brackets around them so that you'd known where to fill in the appropriate replacements. Cynical jokes aside, I can appreciate what Bruce Cordell was doing here. Fleshing out what the Arcane Order is and does required giving it a backstory, and keeping it world-neutral meant that he couldn't default to an existing campaign setting. The end result is [I]probably[/I] the best that could be reasonably accomplished, since grounding the place with a definite past gives him more to work with and therefore lets him present us with a more complete product. That's one of the differences – quite possibly the single largest difference – between this product and [I]Den of Thieves[/I]. That book wanted to be as generic as it could; not only did it have a considerable overview of thieves' guilds in general, but even when it presented its gallery of a sample guild, it kept it focused squarely on the people involved, divorcing them from everything outside of guild activities, let alone providing any sort of history of the campaign world. By contrast, [I]College of Wizardry[/I] grounds itself firmly in the specifics and particulars of what it presents. This isn't a book to generate random wizards schools; it's all about Mathghamhna. The result is that this is a [I]location book[/I] more than anything else. A poster map and two additional maps inside the covers present the entire school, and considerable pages are given over to charting each and every room of the place. Fun fact: there are only two privies in the entire building, one for the headmaster and one for everyone else (although the latter is actually a communal latrine where apprentices go to dump out everyone's chamber pots; and you thought [I]your[/I] primary education was bad!). Likewise, the book overviews fewer NPCs than [I]Den of Thieves[/I], but gives them more depth, with less important characters receiving less information. It's almost amusing how this works: the headmaster and regents who chart the course of the Arcane Order all get full stat blocks, paragraphs of presentation, and sidebars outlining their various secrets and plots. The guild wizards (who are fully-fledged members of the Order) just get names and abbreviated stat blocks. The initiates (i.e. wizards who haven't graduated yet) only get their name, race, sex, class, and level listed. The apprentices (who are all 0-level characters) don't even get that; we're just told how many there are (although two individuals are spotlighted in one of the adventures at the back of the book). The funny thing is how small this makes Mathghamhna seem, since altogether this comprises just over sixty individuals, almost half of which are those nameless and faceless apprentices. Hogwarts and its houses this is clearly not. More notable is how this book keeps nodding its head in the direction of having PCs be students of the Arcane Order, but can't seem to figure out how to make a campaign out of that. For instance, there's a schedule outlining a typical day for apprentice characters, along with a table to see if you're able to successfully shirk your chores and duties, and another table for what happens if you're caught, but none provide experience or anything like that. There [I]is[/I] another table which says how, after X number of years, you have an N-percent chance to becoming a level Z wizard, but the header makes it clear that's for NPCs only. I suppose PCs could use it also, but it's hard to see how as anything other than a background generator for, say, your character's age. And yet, the adventures at the end of the book (four of them, for characters of levels 0, 3-6, 4-8, and 8-11) seem to presume that the characters are students of the school. Which, given that it's a school for, you know, wizards only, seems like an invitation for a TPK, not to mention ruling out a lot of races. I'll say it again that I [I]liked[/I] racial level limits and class restrictions, but it's notable how many character options are excluded here. Humans, elves, and half-elves can be wizards, but gnomes have to be illusionists, and dwarves and halflings are completely out of the picture. So are most other humanoids, if you're inclined to [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/looking-back-at-the-leatherette-series-phbr-dmgr-hr-and-more.677493/post-8192933']go a little further[/URL] than the typical PHB races. Really, this works better if you have mid-level wizard PCs who want to join the Order without having gone to school there (which the book outlines how to do). If not, then I suspect that's why the adventures here are all so short. I thought they were outlines, but they might well just be written that way because they know an all-wizard group won't have much in the way of diverse abilities or staying power. Of course, they're likely to at least have an impressive array of magic. Part of what makes Mathghamhna unique is that it has two very special features: the Spellcrux and access to the Language Primeval. Both are, of course, given extensive coverage. The Spellcrux is sort of a magical relay system, which has a bunch of spells cast into it that attuned wizards can then withdraw and cast on the fly, rather than having to prep their spells ahead of time. So basically it makes them into proto-sorcerers, though it should be noted that there are quite a few limits on how much they can make use of this. By contrast, the Language Primeval (aka [I]Aleph[/I]) is an expensive nonweapon proficiency (four slots!) that, on a successful check, allows a spellcaster to modify a spell they're casting in some way, such as by extending the duration, making the saving throw tougher, reducing the casting time, etc. Whereas the Spellcrux is a new creation by the Arcane Order, the Language Primeval is a mere fragment of the power from the previous age, with the headmaster searching relentlessly for more of the lost language. That's not all the magic you'll find here, of course. There's quite a few new spells and magic items, making this a valuable resource for cherry-picking if nothing else. While none of these were popular enough that they went mainstream in later editions, there are still several that have some impressive presentations, such as the [I]cowl of darkness[/I], which permanently shades the user's face beneath impenetrable blackness, making him almost blind in bright light but giving him great vision in darkness, or spells like [I]one question[/I] (which compels a person to answer a query on a failed save), [I]ESP barricade[/I] (a spell to protect against thought-reading magic), and [I]iterative mnemonic negation[/I] (a powerful enchantment that wipes spell after spell from a caster's mind). I should mention that Cordell's ability to tie various products together is on full display here. Remember how I said that [I]Den of Thieves[/I], which was written by someone else, isn't connected to any of these books? Well, Cordell fixed that; one of the assassins from that book is explicitly mentioned here (even saying that he's from [I]Den of Thieves[/I]), having been hired to kill one of the school's regents. A couple of Dargeshaad's old minions are mentioned in passing, but you might notice that they [URL='https://www.enworld.org/threads/looking-back-at-the-limited-series-players-option-monstrous-arcana-odyssey-and-more.685207/post-8606734']appear again[/URL] in [I]Return to the Tomb of Horrors[/I] as sentient magic items, as does another NPC from that boxed set: Acemadecian Drake. And of course, Mathghamhna will be mentioned in the next book in this series. Overall, this is a book that oozes flavor, and has a lot of resources to offer (especially if you do some tweaking and tailoring), but it stumbles on the practical implementation. Simply put, there isn't enough here to run a "wizard school campaign" on, even if you have the PCs leave after they graduate to become fully-fledged guild wizards (which happens at 7th level). There are ways around this problem, of course; DMs can always introduce new situations and scenarios for student PCs, and you can even bring in other classes if you exercise some creative thinking (e.g. Mathghamhna has mundane guards on loan from the nearby town that supplies the college; that's an opportunity for a fighter PC), but the book doesn't do enough of the heavy lifting in that regard, instead defaulting to the more typical location book format. But maybe that's for the best. Ultimately, D&D isn't built to be a game about kids in a formal academic setting, and trying to twist it in that direction has always struck me as trying to put a square peg into a round hole. You can do it, but it won't be easy, nor will it be pretty. But that's fine by me: if I have to choose between running errands for upperclassmen, and an orc-infested dungeon, then all I've got to say is... School's out. Forever. [MEDIA=youtube]RjIwvfj8Bnk[/MEDIA] [I]Please note my use of affiliate links in this post.[/I] [/QUOTE]
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