Player characters are students at Strixhaven University. Even as they get caught up in the adventures, the characters have to continue going to class, doing homework, and studying for exams.
The characters are also subject to the authority of the university’s faculty and staff members. Circumstances will at times cause player characters to defy faculty authority—and even deans—during their adventures, and the threat of detention or even expulsion might hang over their head.
Finally, student characters are part of a school community. They live in university housing, eat in dining halls, and spend the majority of their time on campus. They eat, sleep, study, socialize, and adventure as part of a community of students, faculty, and staff. The school is like a town, where a relatively small cast of characters can play significant roles over the course of the campaign.
Study at Strixhaven isn’t about learning to be a wizard but about learning to be a historian, an artist, an orator, a scientist, or some other profession—while using magic to enhance one’s studies. The university’s understanding of magic is expansive. Characters of any class can study at Strixhaven, whether they’re full-fledged spellcasters like wizards, clerics, and druids; they manage a spell or two thanks to a subclass or feat; or they manifest magical abilities that aren’t even spells. (For example, a barbarian who follows the Path of the Ancestral Guardian, described in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything, can excel in studying history at Lorehold College by virtue of their connection to an ancestral spirit.)
Magic is everywhere on campus. The campus culture encourages finding magical solutions to the most mundane problems, and if characters need access to a spell they can’t cast, they have a strong chance of finding someone who can cast it.
Strixhaven draws students and faculty from across the world and from other realms in the multiverse. The university’s students and faculty are united by a desire to learn and include humans, elves, dwarves, owlin, orcs, trolls, vampires, and studious folk of many other origins.
In practical terms, for player characters, you can use the rules found in any D&D book to select a character’s race, if the DM approves. For nonplayer characters, you’re as likely to meet a pixie, a dryad, a giant, a treant, or another fantastical creature on campus as you are to meet a Humanoid. The faculty members include genasi, tritons, and even a bipedal brown bear.
To the faculty and students of Strixhaven, it is unremarkable to meet someone who hails from a far-off land, since almost everyone on campus is from somewhere else. Strixhaven has a place for anyone who is dedicated to magic-enhanced study.