One of Strixhaven’s most famous students is Zimone Wola. The other is Everest Hootersby — a character I made up, who helped me tell a more successful story than the adventures presented in Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos.

Zimone debuted in Magic: The Gathering’s 2021 set called Strixhaven: School of Mages. She was a first-year student in the Quandrix (blue-green) college, studying the intersection of magic, nature, and mathematics. She eventually went on to pursue dangerous graduate-level fieldwork. She also headlines the Quandrix Unlimited preconstructed Commander deck in the brand-new Secrets of Strixhaven set.

A few years back, when I got a rare chance to actually play a character with my Dungeons & Dragons group (I often serve as the Dungeon Master in my homebrew setting), I knew I wanted to finally give the Wizard class a try. Because I happened to have a copy of the Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos sourcebook, I spent days combing through it to make some kind of silly scholar mage. What better way to build a Wizard than to leverage a literal school of magic?

The book has but a single unique race option (which 5.5e now calls ancestry): the Owlin. Like real owls, they move silently, can see in the dark, and have innate flight — three hugely useful features in D&D. Curriculum of Chaos depicts owls of various shapes and sizes. Some are tiny, some are lithe and muscular, but some of them are just comically enormous, like they took a chubby owl, gave them clawed arms, and made them ten times as big.

I adore the way Mavinda Sharpbeak is depicted on the School of Mages card Mavinda, Students' Advocate. The art reminds me of Raphael’s The School of Athens painting, where Plato and Aristotle huddle close together........

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