Pray For My Soul: My Party Has Hit Tier 4

 There was, in it all, a bit of a fakeout.

The premise, in short, of my current D&D campaign is that, on the city-plane of Ravnica, there is a conspiracy to bring the glistening oil of Phyrexia to convert the massive population into a horde of mechano-organic hybrids serving the hivemind of Magic's oldest villains.

Ravnica is a city ruled over by ten Guilds - groups that run aspects of society but have wildly different worldviews and goals. Half the population of the world is a member of one guild or another. And so, the Circle of Yawgmoth, the cult that seeks to bring Phyrexian corruption to the world, has representatives from amongst each of the ten guilds, each taking the title of "Praetor," which is a position of great and grand authority amongst the Phyrexians.

Their first Praetor was a merfolk in the Simic Combine (the biomancer doctor guild,) and the buildup to that fight was the entirety of tier 2 (levels 5-10).

Thus, most of the campaign has taken place in tier 3. My initial goal was to simply have them level up with the defeat of each Praetor - there were 9 left starting at level 11, so by the time they defeated them all, they'd be level 20 and we'd have the finale of the campaign take them to New Phyrexia itself (the corrupted plane once known as Mirrodin).

However, I decided that there was more that I wanted to do, including some adventures taking place amidst the many planes of the Magic multiverse. So I had to pull back on that - the new promise to the players was that once all the Praetors on Ravnica, the one for each guild, were defeated, they would hit tier 4. Before that, they'd still level up at these major milestones, but we'd stick at level 16 for a bit until everything was cleaned up.

But...

House Dimir is something special.

When I first discovered Ravnica upon its original release in 2006, I fell in love with House Dimir. It's the ultimate conspiracy, the shadowy organization with spies embedded everywhere. Beyond simple Magic the Gathering, it really cultivated within me a fascination with stories about deep, hidden secrets and spies and all of that.

If you've read any of my fiction on another blog here, you might be aware of "The House" in my Otherworld stories, and... well, you don't have to guess what inspired that.

In all honesty, in my mind, I think House Dimir became more powerful and more mysterious even than the game's designers meant it to.

And it does not play by the same rules as the other guilds.

So, upon the defeat of the penultimate Praetor, the Lich Traven Nazar, who had been a high-ranking banker in the Orzhov Syndicate (he ran Vizkopa Bank, which is the vast vault directly next to the guildhall, Orzhova Cathedral,) the party sort of took a moment to catch their breath after a difficult and deadly encounter, and then a high-pitched whine began to sound within their own heads and...

They jumped forward about a week, being celebrated as the heroes of the city for having defeated the Circle of Yawgmoth and saved the plane from the Phyrexian menace.

And, keeping with this narrative, I allowed the party to level up to 17.

But this also led to the entire world, including the player characters, forgetting that House Dimir exists, and forgetting about anyone they ever met who had been affiliated with the guild (including one of the characters of a player who has been unable to play for a while).

Now, the nuances of all of this are going to unfold as we play at 17th level, and you could make the argument that I wasn't even lying that all of the Praetors have been defeated.

While I've loved running the campaign, dramatically it's been a little one-note: pretty much any major threat is, once again, the Phyrexians. And with what is going on in House Dimir, let's just say... it's more complicated than that.

I've been setting this up for a while, showing that people across the city have been forgetting about House Dimir, but now it's truly everyone (you might wonder, given that half the populace is affiliated with one of the ten guilds, what has happened to the members of House Dimir? Well, that'd be telling).

I'm hoping that things will start to get a little more free-form. The challenge for me is to avoid derailing what I have planned for levels 18 and 19 when I use level 17 to foreshadow things that are going to go down at level 20.