Skip Hogwarts Legacy and watch some Harry Potter-style D&D instead

Hogwarts Legacy comes out next week. It is, bar none, the biggest video game to ever use the ever-popular Harry Potter license. A Dragon Age-style open-world RPG, made by Warner Bros. Games and Avalanche Software (recently of the scuttled Disney Infinity), it’s kind of a huge deal. The game been sitting at the top of the Steam sales charts even as a pre-order.

Even so, the game has become controversial. Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling has been a lightning rod of controversy for several years, and while it doesn’t appear that she has any direct involvement in the game, it’s hard to deny that buying it means supporting her financially. Plenty of Harry Potter fans aren’t willing to do that, for reasons that are both well-known and beyond the scope of PCWorld’s coverage.

But neither Warner Bros. nor Rowling have an exclusive on the idea of teenage wizards and witches. So if you need to scratch that Harry Potter itch and you don’t want to buy the game (or go see increasingly terrible spin-off movies), I’ve got a humble suggestion: watch a bunch of nerds play Dungeons and Dragons instead.

Misfits and Magic, a Kids on Brooms actual play

Okay, some qualifications. The bunch of nerds in question are professional actors, comedians, and other masters of improvising in front of a camera. And the game they’re playing isn’t Dungeons and Dragons, though the actual play format is certainly inspired by it. No, in the Misfits and Magic mini-season of long-running D&D show Dimension 20, game master Aabria Iyengar chose to use the Kids on Brooms system to tell her story. It’s a tale that mixes the familiar and the deliberately subversive: four diverse American kids are invited to become the first exchange students at a prestigious British school of witchcraft and wizardry.

The cast is filled with veterans of the emerging, and booming, actual play genre. Lou Wilson (a regular Dimension 20 player and as of 2022 the announcer for Jimmy Kimmel Live) plays Whitney Jammer, a Chicago high school athlete who’s all about the team, whatever team he might be on. Erika Ishii (whom gamers will recognize from Apex Legends, Deathloop, and Desitny 2) plays Karen Tanaka, AKA “:xxBrokenDreamxx”, AKA Dream, a terminally online kid from Seattle who knows the local Hot Topic layout by heart. Danielle Radford (a regular writer from YouTube’s Honest Trailers) plays Sam Black, a girl from Portland who’s already well into a successful influencer career. And Dimension 20‘s usual GM, Brennan Lee Mulligan, shifts into the player character chair to embody Evan Kelmp, a gawky but sweet homeless kid who may or may not be this world’s version of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.

Iyengar sets the stage with familiar scenes: all four of the Misfits are going about their regular lives in America when they’re delivered letters by owl, inviting them to Gawpenny Academy, a prestigious school that will be familiar to anyone who knows the skyline of a certain Scottish castle by heart. They’re dropped into a wizarding world that has little knowledge or care for the non-magical one they came from, instantly out of place as both Americans and fledgling wizards.

This seems familiar…

What follows are role-playing sessions that exhibit both deep love for, and skeptical takedowns of, the Harry Potter world. The player characters (and pretty much only the player characters) are very much aware of Rowling’s franchise, and the parts of it that are either problematic or ridiculous. During Gawpenny’s equivalent of the Sorting Hat ceremony, for example, the kids call out the practice as a medieval form of educational tracking, and wonder at the expectation of a school house that seems to be explicitly reserved for “evil” kids. Evan, very much aware of his status as a possible Damien-style world-ender, doesn’t appreciate it.

The players, like the characters they embody, are also very aware of Harry Potter and some of the issues that have been raised with the series in the last four years. Iyengar’s setting, while generally conforming to the expectations of Hogwarts, welcomes the realities of modern kids (and particularly modern American kids of widely different backgrounds). The kids, unlike the adults, are more than willing to take on topics of race, classism, sexism, and the expectations that all of them can place on young people. Though it should be pointed out that there’s a bit of an incongruence in adults playing the role of teenagers: this show would get a TV-MA rating for language alone if it was broadcast on TV. It’s very much made for adult fans of Harry Potter, not those who are still within its recommended age group.

The show serves as a great introduction to both the actual play format, already made popular by shows like Critical Role and Dimension 20, and the Kids on Brooms system from Renegade Game Studios. The latter is a much simpler, easier-to-pick up role-playing game than D&D, using far fewer stats, dice, and general gunk than you might expect. The addition of adversity tokens, points earned by failing that can be shared between players and applied to future rolls, means that even a disastrous roll isn’t without its upside.

The shorter, punchier series of just four episodes (less than ten hours total) does without the impressive set dressing that Dimension 20 is known for. You won’t get elaborate miniature battle sets or fancy editing. It’s just five people playing in the theater of the mind, with the occasional illustration thrown on screen to help the viewer’s imagination. But the earnestness and depth with which Iyengar and company play their roles make it compelling from start to finish.

Mulligan in particular shines playing just one character rather than his usual dozens: Evan’s tales of desperately finding food or a place to sleep, in addition to possibly being an incipient dark lord, are alternately shocking and hilarious. Ishii’s Dream, coming to terms with the disappointment of both the world of magic and her own self-expectations, goes through a similar and deliberately mirrored arc.

Poking fun with pointy wands

Misfits and Magic takes Harry Potter to task even while reveling in its tropes. But it does so without the biting cynicism you might expect. While the characters do call BS on a lot of the actions of both the “real” Hogwarts and its in-universe equivalent, many of those points are just as salient hurled at real-world educational systems and the assumptions therein. Even so, the overall attitude is one of compassion and acceptance, at first between the player characters, and eventually the other students played by Iyengar.

And since pretty much everyone involved has at least some degree of comedy chops, the results are frequently hilarious. Four American kids trying to order a McRib from a magical British kitchen (this time without the weird inclusion of slavery) is a sight to behold, even if you’ll have to imagine almost all of the scene in your head. The “common fucking sense die,” which allows players to get tangible gameplay boosts for subverting the magical narrative with real-world smarts, is an especially brilliant addition. But as the series wraps up, the feeling is more of wholesomeness than comedy: watching these kids find a home and a second family tugs all the heartstrings that the Harry Potter books do, and then some.

The first episode of Misfits and Magic is available to watch for free on YouTube. The other three episodes, as well as the holiday special, are available on Dropout.TV for $5 a month. (You can watch all of it, and quite a lot more Dimension 20 besides, with just a month’s sub.) The Kids on Brooms tabletop game is $25 for the rulebook, and it can be played with standard sets of RPG dice. And incidentally, you can get all of them for less than half of the price of Hogwarts Legacy.