Friday, July 30, 2021

The Deep History of Dominaria and What I'd Love to See in a D&D Dominaria Book

 Magic the Gathering was built initially on broad fantasy tropes. The core concept of the game - the iconic division of fantasy into five broad "colors" that could represent different styles of magic along with different value systems - served to primarily hit generic fantasy concepts. To be fair, we did have some proper nouns or adjectives in there starting in Alpha, like Serra Angels, Sengir Vampires, or Benalish Heroes, but I think the actual meaning of who Serra or Sengir were, or where Benalia was, wouldn't really be fleshed out until later.

With the exceptions of Arabian Nights, which took place on the dubiously canonical "Rabiah," and Homelands (which took place on Ulgrotha and was the work of outside contractors,) every Magic set took place on Dominaria until Tempest block took us to Rath (which then wound up overlaying with Dominaria anyway,) and the plane remained the central setting even after the climactic Invasion block, continuing on with the post-apocalyptic Odyssey and Onslaught blocks (which told effectively a single interconnected story over two years.)

When WotC returned to Dominaria in 2018 for the aptly named "Dominaria" set, the design team ran into a challenge. When the game started hopping around to a different plane each year, they were able to build around a major concept: Mirrodin was the "Artifact world." Kamigawa was the "Legends world" along with a strong Japanese inspiration. Ravnica was "can we do a multicolor block, but rather than having everyone playing five-color decks, we're going to encourage them to stick to two-color decks" that coupled with a vast urban setting to be maybe their most successful high-concept world.

Since then, we've had the three-color block with Alara, the tribal block (which to be fair, had also been the theme in Onslaught) in Lorwyn, the "Lands" setting in Zendikar, the Enchantment-themed setting in Theros, etc.

Innistrad was the first setting arguably since Dominaria in the beginning to be built around top-down designs - starting with the in-universe concept for the card and building its mechanics out from there, but still retaining the cohesive mechanical consistency of modern design.

Given that Dominaria was built as "the fantasy setting," because there weren't any others, the designers needed to come up with a new hook for the world that wasn't boring. After all, literally all Magic planes are fantasy settings. So what sets Dominaria apart?

The answer, it turns out, is history. While Ravnica's Guildpact went back 10,000 years, there's a very tiny sliver of that time that we really know anything about. I can tell you, running a D&D campaign in Ravnica requires a lot of invention on the part of the DM if you want to introduce any sense of anything happening before about 70 years earlier (which is when the original Ravnica block took place.)

But Dominaria has an extensive history that dates back thousands of years. Even before the time of Urza, you have the ancient civilization of the Thran, not to mention the Elder Dragons.

What's really interesting is that one of Magic's first sets, Antiquities, actually served to give some of that ancient history for the setting. Rather than hit the ground running and give us a current story, Magic's second expansion set, following Arabian Nights (which was just a top-down recreation of famous stories from real-world folklore) and was thus the first time that Dominaria really started to get fleshed out as its own fantasy setting, we instead got what seemed to be the tale of an ancient conflict - something that we, as players (and thus powerful planeswalkers, though I don't even know if that concept had developed yet) were digging through in our own, later conflicts.

While the subsequent set, Legends, established the Legendary card type (that would get cleaned up in Kamigawa block and refined over the years) and thus gave us characters who were actual individuals rather than generic types (Arabian Nights had also had such cards, but with no rule to preserve their uniqueness) we didn't really follow the stories of individuals for the next couple years. The Dark explored the horrific dark age that came with what was effectively the beginning of a nuclear winter after the events of the Brothers' War, and Fallen Empires continued that theme of collapse and downfall with the civilizations of Sarpadia. Ice Age introduced new heroes and villains in the frigid time period that followed, but it wasn't really until Mirage block that a focus on stories and characters really came to the fore, introducing Teferi as well as the skyship Weatherlight.

From there, we got Tempest Block, which in stark contrast was basically a story told over the course of three major card sets, and the crew of the Weatherlight, along with a still very much alive Urza who was guiding (or manipulating, depending on how you see him) them in his quest to protect Dominaria from the Phyrexians.

What I find really interesting is that even that story, with the entire Phyrexian invasion, is now, I believe, centuries in the past as of the "current" state of Magic's story. In true edgy 90s fashion, nearly all the main heroes of that story died by the end of Invasion block, and while we got two blocks with a new group of characters on the continent on Otaria, it wasn't until a few years later with, I believe, Lorwyn block, that we got the new planeswalker characters who would become the face of Magic like Liliana Vess, Chandra Nalaar, or Jace Beleren. Magic had moved on from Dominaria at that point, and so among their number, only Liliana has a direct connection to that plane (being a native.)

But with the recent (and likely upcoming) revisit to the setting, we have a sense of the modern state of the world. And in stark contrast to places like Ravnica and Theros, which don't really have a developed sense of history (Theros, according to its D&D book, exists in a kind of mythic time where there is no real sense of history,) Dominaria has many different ages of history to explore. And it turns out that having many eras of history is pretty great material for a game all about delving into deep dungeons and discovering their ancient secrets.

While I think that Mythic Odysseys of Theros and Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica had to incorporate new world-building to flesh out the book, like the big map of the Tenth District, Dominaria almost certainly already has too much to fit. I mean, look at this map:


I think that any Dominaria sourcebook would have to pick a continent here to focus on. Most likely that would be Aerona, with its iconic lands of Benalia, Llanowar, and Keld, though I also find my eye drawn to other familiar names like Femeref, Urborg, Shiv, Yavimaya, etc.

While Dominaria's status as the most "generic" fantasy setting from MTG could be a detriment, I also think that there's a lot of potential in exploring its unique idiosyncrasies. The world is covered with wreckage from the various apocalyptic events it has witnessed, and I think we could have a lot of fun turning remnants of Phyrexia, Slivers, and other Magic-specific monsters into D&D stat blocks.

I'd also love to have some official rules for Planeswalkers. Admittedly, the crossovers have played a little with the "canon" of the various worlds - some might run Ravnica as just another world of the Prime Material Plane, with Rakdos having come from the Abyss. Not me, though. I've made a core part of my Ravnica campaign that everyone, from the Druids to the Barbarians, has a planeswalker spark that will ignite when the right emotional triggers occur (a couple characters are coming up on that soon!)

Artificers are the only class to be added to 5th Edition D&D. Initially introduced in Eberron: Rising from the Last War, the class was fully reprinted in the setting-agnostic rules expansion: Tasha's Cauldron of Everything. As a general principle, WotC has avoided having any D&D book require you to own any other D&D books except for the Core Three (Player's Handbook, Dungeon Master's Guide, and Monster Manual.) The purpose of this is laudable (keeping the books accessible) but I do worry that it can also hamstring the development of new things like the Artificer class. If needs be, I'd hope that a Dominaria sourcebook would include the Artificer class (perhaps with a new subclass) given the importance of artificers in the setting.

Urza, after all, while playing the part of an ancient, ageless wizard, was actually, explicitly, an artificer (granted, if I gave him a stat block I'd probably somehow allow him access to high-level magic - though maybe through magic devices rather than traditional spellcasting.) Dominaria has had its share of more technological magic, not to mention a need to understand all of that given the mechanical nature of the Phyrexians (and Yawgmoth was originally a human Dominarian, after all.) One of the newer Dominaria-based characters, Tiana, is an angel of the church of Serra who is also an artificer and serves as the Weatherlight's engineer.

I think the setting would be extremely effective as a D&D campaign setting. Given how frequent WotC has been publishing MTG-based D&D books (with a Strixhaven one coming later this year,) I think that if the rumors of a return to Dominaria some time in 2022 are true, it would be a great opportunity to produce a nice big tome for setting D&D games in that world.

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