Pulling the Trigger on My Ravnica Campaign

I've sent out invites to players for my Ravnica campaign.

It's a little nervous-making, doing so, given that I haven't really started a big, ongoing campaign since the very first one I started four years ago. That campaign is still technically on, but given that we only had 4 or 5 sessions over the last year, I wanted to get this one going to hopefully be a more regular game.

So far, a couple of players have started to sketch out their characters, and I've decided to officially invite people months ahead of time (our first game is scheduled for March 2nd) so that we can work on figuring out characters ahead of time.

Characters will begin in relative isolation - the premise is that some time between Dragon's Maze and Guilds of Ravnica, the severely understaffed Office of the Guildpact has reached out to the guilds to send them recruits to help perform the duties of the Guildpact while Jace is busy. There's about five hundred people working there for a city of I believe 800 billion (Ravnica's supposed to be about the size of the moon, and I estimated it has a density comparable to New York City, and just did some math.)

There's going to be a background arc-plot, but I've intentionally left the early adventures largely separated. Indeed, there will be several different major villains with their own schemes that may or may not be connected to the campaign's big bad.

I've created villains in each guild, and my hope is to establish the morally grey atmosphere of Ravnica in the early sessions - yes, the Boros Legion is led by angels, but their self-righteousness can allow them to excuse heinous behavior if they feel it's "just," and a group like the Cult of Rakdos, so frightening and horrific, might also serve as a loving home for the weird goth kids who don't fit in with their family.

Obviously, as with any D&D campaign, we're playing in the DM and players' version of the world, and I'm trying to emphasize the humanity across all of Ravnica, while also providing otherworldly and terrifying monsters for people to fight.

This is a far bigger group than I'm used to DMing, but the intention is that there will be enough players that we can be missing over half of them and still play.

We're, of course, months away from the actual game, and I'm trying not to do too much planning in advance, but I'm very excited for it to start.