No love for 5e Strixhaven - A Curriculum of Chaos

https://www.strangeassembly.com/2021/spoiler-free-review-strixhaven-a-curriculum-of-chaos

There’s a ton to like about Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos. It does a really good job of taking the MTG ‘wizarding school’ location and turning it into a great D&D setting, including a nice pre-made cast of faculty and students. It sets up a good framework to make things like classes and activities and relationships into something mechanically meaningful. But you do need to have the right DM – A Curriculum of Chaos just isn’t something that the DM can pick up and run. A session zero is probably more useful here than in any other published 5E adventure just to establish who these characters are, why they’re at this school, and why they’re hanging out together all the time. The DM needs to keep track of all of the student NPCs and how they interact with the PCs. They need to proactively inject social interactions and, to a lesser extent, academic events, into the story. You can maybe get away with not creating fun scenes during class, but you’ve absolutely got to work in those social interactions (it reminds me of something Powered by the Apocalypse, like the Phoenix Academy setting for Masks). But if you’ve got that right sort of DM – and the right sort of players – there’s a big payoff to be had. For the right D&D group, Strixhaven: A Curriculum of Chaos, will be fabulous.

http://rpgnews.com/?p=152116

BUY IT
If you and your players are always looking to dive deeper into the social pillar of D&D.
If you always wanted to run a campaign set at a school for wizards that focused on school life.
If you are looking for social rules or ideas on how to run a "sport" encounter.
If you are looking for a cosmopolitan setting where any character from the multiverse can easily fit in and everyone is from somewhere else.
If you are looking for a setting that does a good job blending a wizard school and college campus life.

AVOID IT
If your players want to play morally ambiguous or even evil characters.
If you are looking for a heavy setting book for Strixhaven. The actual setting content clock in at only twenty-three pages but the adventures are full of interesting locations such as cafes, taverns, libraries, stages, and other places you’d expect to find on campus.
If you have no interest in running a campaign that spends all of its time focused on school life.
If your table doesn’t enjoy focusing on heavy roleplaying, social encounters, and non-combat challenges.
If you are looking for tons of new content to drop into your own campaign world. Other than the owlin race and the spells, the player options are limited and only really useful to this campaign. Also, the "monsters" are solid and provide a ton of casters that can be dropped into any campaign but are pretty specific to this campaign.

I got an early copy of Strixhaven to read through and review. Now that it has dropped, here's what I thought!
Quick Review (No Spoilers)

Player options account for approximately 21 pages of this book and include:

A new playable race, the Owlin
5 new backgrounds for Strixhaven students, one from each of the Strixhaven Colleges
2 new feats
5 new spells
8 new magic items

The rest of the book is for DMs and will be primarily used to run a game in the world of Strixhaven:

17 pages about life on the Strixhaven campus
4 short adventures that take players from 1st to 10th level
44 new monsters and NPCs to populate the world of Strixhaven

Pros

The adventure included in this book makes the setting a lot more accessible to your average playgroup. Other campaign settings which only provide an overview of the setting are reliant on the DM to homebrew an entire campaign whereas the Strixhaven book gives tables a good launching off point.

The adventure chapters provide plenty of area maps as well as battlemaps for important locations around campus that can be helpful even if you aren’t going to run the adventure.

The NPCs provided in this book are fleshed-out and can be useful for running a Strixhaven campaign even if you don’t follow the adventure.

The backgrounds provided in this book are very unique because they provide a feat based on the college chosen, on top of extra spells. This makes the student background easily the most powerful background choice released in 5e, though they are quite specific to Strixhaven. They may need some reworking to fit into other settings, but for those players looking to optimize a build for another campaign they will provide a significant power boost.

Cons

This book is very much a resource for running adventures in the university of Strixhaven. There are only a couple of pages devoted to the larger magics and mysteries of Arcavios which introduce more questions than they answer. If you’re planning an adventure that uses Strixhaven as a starting point and are planning on branching into the rest of the world, you won’t have much information to go off of.

Likewise, because this book isn’t entirely devoted to the adventure, it is lacking in some areas. We discuss the adventure, what it does right, and where it can be improved in the in-depth review.

Most of the playable options presented in this book (spells, magic items, background, feats, and even the monsters to some extent) are very setting specific. If you were to buy this book to read, but also wanted to have access to the content for a separate non-Strixhaven campaign, there won’t be a ton of options that can directly be transferred across without having a wizard school of some sort in your world.

Apart from four classes (one for each year), classes are skipped over entirely. We have attempted to remedy this situation by compiling 144 class ideas for Strixhaven courses in our supplement Strixhaven: A Syllabus of Sorcery.