My Strixhaven Murder Mystery is Just Ramping Up
Hello friends!
The most recent campaign run by yours truly involves the 5th Edition adaptation of Magic: The Gathering‘s “Strixhaven” world. For those who don’t know, “Strixhaven” is set on the plain of Arcavios, and is the name of a prestigious magical college in which students from across the multiverse come to study, experiment, and build relationships. It has quite a number of respected scholars and strange occurrences.
However, this time is a little different. While using the sourcebook as inspiration, The world crafted for this campaign involves much more of the original MTG lore than the sourcebook tends to inscribe. Likely by the time this post is released a rather large secret will have been revealed within the campaign: one of big bads of the TCG’s story has made their way into the world in a significant way.
The sourcebook does have a fully fleshed out story. On top of that, Laziness tends to get the better of me when it comes to running campaigns. Not always though. Something about adding the machine-like creatures to this innocent looking world felt correct. After all, the original story has a mysterious oil appearing on campus as a major part of the story. It almost seems like the writers of the campaign did this specifically so that DMs could add in elements of Magic’s story rather easily.
Though the players have been having a good amount of fun with it for over a year now, that has usually come at the expense of forward story progress. Often they will lean into comedic bits (sometimes far enough in that they fall into making me write fanfiction). This is totally fine. We’re all pretty close IRL, and the campaign is only meant to be semi-serious, with darker parts of the story only just beginning to come to fruition. Another favorite of mine is that our Barbarian Loxodon Johnny Peanuts (a reference to a somewhat famous Magic card) comes from a mafia family, and has decided to take his new Owlin-friend Thalix under his…uh, trunk?, to which Thalix seems to be a little bit to enthused.
The party is also under a lot of watchful eyes. Part of this comes from being popular among the student body after saving fellow classmates from a few monster attacks up until this point. More worrying for them are the eyes of professors and college deans. The student councilor, an Owlin named Mavinda Sharpbeak, seems to be watching them closely while also trying to figure out the origin of the mysterious black oil. Much of the story up to this point has been about finding who they can and can’t trust.
Most recently, players were tasked exploring a manor on central campus late at night. At the end up it, they find a Witherbloom first-year carved up and beaten to death. The culprit: an infamous toy doll used in various pranks that was confiscated by professors named Sassy Sally Jane, one they were tasked with retrieving by their new friends. Last session ends with the sobering realization that whatever this oil is, its dangerous. They currently have way more friends than foes on campus, but that’s not to say that couldn’t change.
I’ll spare more details in case one of them happens across this online. Suffice to say, things will be getting a lot more interesting going forward.
Thanks for reading!
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Bye for now 😉
