Races of Ravnica

It's a ways off, and I have yet to finalize who, exactly, is playing, but some time next year I am planning on starting a Ravnica campaign, designed specifically to allow adults with complex schedules to not have to be there every week.

But there is one issue that I figured it would be good to figure out ahead of time: Races.

Ravnica is, after all, its own world. And while it shares a lot of traits with D&D settings, there are some exceptions.

For example, one of the most iconic races you'll find in D&D is Dwarves, who date back to the kind of holy quadfecta established by Tolkien - Humans, Elves, Dwarves, and Halflings. But Magic, for a while, including when Ravnica was introduced, had kind of put the kibosh on Dwarves.

A big part of that was due to the color pie. Dwarves were historically Red creatures, largely due to their propensity for living in mountains. But Red is also the color of passion and chaos, and Dwarves are usually depicted as quite lawful and staid. Because Goblins fit the "red creature" bill much better, they tended to dominate as the default red humanoid creature type.

Dwarves have started to come back in more recent sets (likewise Orcs, who fit Red perfectly but I think mostly had a bit too much of an overlap with Goblins) but when Ravnica came out, Wizards of the Coast felt that Dwarves didn't really fit - they were really white creatures that lived in red environments.

In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, there are a few playable races listed: Humans, Elves, Half-Elves, and Goblins make up the standard D&D ones that were published elsewhere (most in the PHB, but Goblins came in Volo's Guide to Monsters.) Then you got Minotaurs and Centaurs, which exist in D&D but not typically as playable characters, and then you got Magic-specific creatures: Vedalken, Loxodon, and Simic Hybrids - the last of which isn't really a creature type. Instead, cards with such beings are often "Merfolk Elf Mutant" or "Vedalken Crab Mutant." (Actually, Merfolk were only introduced to Ravnica in the Return to Ravnica block, because like Dwarves, Merfolk were generally phased out at a time when they didn't think it made sense for aquatic people to fight on land - until someone had the rather obvious idea of making Magic Merfolk amphibious and bipedal.)

These are the races that are officially allowed in Ravnica as a setting.

But a lot of my players have expressed interest in playing, for example, Dwarves or Halflings.

So first off, I've expanded the race options to cover races that are clearly present in Ravnica. Simply re-skinning things, we've got Merfolk available as a re-skin of the Triton (which, frankly, is basically a Merfolk as seen in Magic anyway.) Next, Viashino are easily represented by the Lizardfolk (again, that's pretty much what they are already.)

The third race I added is Vampires. Now, this is a bit more of a stretch. I've based them off the Ixalan Plane Shift article's Vampires, but divided the race into two subraces - Blooddrinkers and Minddrinkers, as those two are clearly delineated in Ravnica. The one little hiccup is that the player race is still considered humanoid while the monster statblock is Undead. I think that shouldn't be too much of an issue, but I might need to make up some lore reason for this.

That basically covers all the standard humanoids that are depicted in Ravnica. But what about other D&D races?

I'm a little torn here. My own setting is very liberal in terms of playable races - I've always been happy to justify people playing what they want. But Ravnica, being an official setting, is one I wonder about being more strict toward.

On the other hand, however, Ravnica is also a city whose population has to be in the trillions. If we assume Ravnica's surface area is even a quarter of the size of Earth's, the level of urban density means that the numbers would be utterly staggering. The population density of the Earth is about 15 people per square kilometer. The population density of New York City is 10,194 per square kilometer. New York is 783.8 square kilometers. The earth's is 510.1 million square kilometers.

So if we assume that Ravnica has the same population density of New York (which it appears to,) a Ravnica the size of the earth would have 5,199,959,400,000 people (that's 5.2 trillion.) So Ravnica, if it is as big as Earth, has the population of about 675 Earths.

That's a lot of people.

And for that reason, I think it's totally reasonable for there to be some populations that we just didn't see depicted on cards.

So even if I want to fight hard to make sure that it feels like Ravnica - I don't want anyone talking about growing up in the wilderness or living in some isolated monastery far from the city - I think we can allow for other D&D races to find themselves in Ravnica.

Dwarves, for instance, would probably be very at home in the Boros Legion. Rock Gnomes would probably fit in very nicely with the Izzet League. Orcs make perfect sense in the Gruul Clans (as well as the Boros, actually.)

I think the key will be to ensure that players still buy into the idea of the Guilds and how their membership within a guild is a core to their character's identity.

And that everyone's a city person.