Magic: The Gathering's wizard school Strixhaven is coming to D&D

Student wizards on the cover of Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos
(Image credit: Wizards of the Coast)

D&D setting the Forgotten Realms arrived in Magic: The Gathering recently, but crossovers going in the other direction are more common. Publisher Wizards of the Coast has already brought out several supplements introducing material based on Magic as part of D&D's 5th edition, and the next of those is based on the wizard college of Strixhaven, which was the theme of April's set of Magic cards.

Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos has info on the location, a magic university you can drop into an existing D&D world, as well four scenarios that can be strung together in a multiyear campaign where players begin as level-one first-year students and work their way up. It includes rules for playing the owlin (yep, owlfolk), various new spells, magic items, feats and backgrounds, as well as over 40 magical creatures and NPCs. The idea of running a campaign where everyone's a college-age magic-user sounds like a riot, though I suspect it'll contain options for broader character concepts as well.

The current D&D Live 2021 event has revealed info about some other forthcoming D&D books too. Fizban's Treasury of Dragons will detail 20 different varieties of the scaly beasts, as well as more options for dragonborn characters and dragon-themed monk and ranger subclasses, while The Wild Beyond the Witchlight will be the next big adventure module. It takes players from whatever world they call home to the Feywild via something called the "Witchlight Carnival", and every encounter will have a potential non-combat solution, which sounds intriguing.

Watch D&D Live for deep dives into the upcoming books, as well as livestreamed games featuring celebrities including Jack Black. Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos will be out on November 16, following The Wild Beyond the Witchlight on September 21 and Fizban's Treasury of Dragons on October 19.

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.