Renown and Ravnica Campaign Structure

I've only really run one D&D campaign, but it has been going for a few years, and I've learned a lot about the benefits and challenges of free-form sandboxes, linear adventures, and letting players improvise (though I'm of course still learning.)

What I find quite interesting about Ravnica, and specifically the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, is the inherent structure it lends to a campaign.

Each guild functions as a faction in which a player can earn renown. You'll generally only earn renown in your own guild (unless you're Dimir, in which the guild you've infiltrated thinks you're one of them.) Doing quests and missions for your guild will earn you greater status within it - you'll start to be able to bring NPCs and allied monsters with you when doing things for your guild (and sometimes just whenever.)

You can, of course, run a campaign with all the party members being part of the same guild. What this means is that the party should probably rank-up in renown at the same rate, gaining many of the same benefits.

On one hand, the book structures gaining renown as a resource to gather. Each mission you complete for your guild nets you, essentially, a renown point, or sometimes two. Ranks get unlocked at certain rates of renown, with the very earliest benefits coming at three renown.

I think there's a good question to be asked as to just how much such a mission entails.

I tend to like longer, more complex and multi-stage adventures. Right now my party is in the middle of some more episodic adventures, but for example, the one that they are about to start has four combat encounters and a bit of environmental and social interaction to get there - I suspect that we'll take two to four sessions to get through it.

Actually, it's for a faction that is partially inspired by the Rakdos - a faction that I created to allow chaotic evil characters to serve as heroic and altruistic function on my world - but that's just a coincidence.

The thing is, if you were to have missions like the ones I design, and they only awarded one renown point - and that only going to the party member who is in that guild - it means that it would be nearly impossible to hit those higher ranks.

So rules as written for Ravnica are for either a single-guild party, or one that does almost exclusively very short-term episodes, or both. Getting four party members in different guilds to 50 renown (which is where the ranks cap out) would likely make hitting level 20 seem quick and easy.

So I would recommend accelerating tasks for the guilds as you go. There are tangible benefits even at the first rank (which generally requires 3 renown) that you might want to build to slowly, but I think you could start being more generous with renown as the campaign goes on. A mission or quest could be broken into smaller component parts that each reward a renown, or perhaps you could just give bigger chunks of it as the players did higher-level missions.

To be fair, I think hitting the highest levels of renown is meant to be something level 20 players could still work on. You don't want a bunch of level 5 characters to already have access to swarms of NPCs under their command.

While Ravnica is set up very nicely for short adventures and quests, and you could certainly run a very episodic campaign, I'm always a fan of the longer, serialized stories.

You could approach this a couple ways:

One is the Buffy approach - you take episodic stories that touch on or brush up against a larger plot. Yes, you might just be clearing some Izzet lab of renegade weirds, but you also happen to find that one of the dead researchers had a note about some argument between Ral Zarek and Niv-Mizzet, giving you further insight into some grand plot involving Nicol Bolas (look the names up if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Another is a more strictly serialized approach - every plot is directly connected, but they take you all over the city. If it's a plane-threatening bad guy your party is trying to stop, it might be that anything you do to stop the big bad (like Nicol Bolas, for example) is going to please your guild, regardless of whether it's in their typical wheelhouse. This would allow members of different guilds to earn renown on the same adventures, which gives you some of the best of both worlds.

Of course, if your big bad is a member (or guildmaster) of a guild, it might be easy to have plenty of adventures themed around the villainous guild, and any guild that opposes it (which is basically the other 9 in many cases) would reward renown for foiling their plans.

My Weird Relationship With Nicol Bolas

When I was about eight, I had just started playing Magic the Gathering - indeed, anyone playing it had just started playing because the game was only two or so years old. I got a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, which started my love affair with Black. (I was amazed to think that a 1/1 could possibly be better than most other creatures.)

At the time, it was common wisdom amongst my elementary school peers that Shivan Dragon was the best creature in Magic, though massive beasts like Force of Nature or Leviathan (or the Lord of the Pit) were also big contenders.

But then I heard about these particular creatures of special renown: the Elder Dragon Legends.

The Elder Dragon Legends followed the following formula: they were three colors, two of each color in an allied shard (in other words a color with its two allies) plus two generic for a casting cost. They were each 7/7 flyers, and each required you to pay one of each of their mana colors on your upkeep or sacrifice them.

Screw the Shivan Dragon, these guys were the best. Indeed, the inaccessibility of requiring hard commitments to three colors was part of the appeal (though, at least at my school, the very notion of not playing all five colors was foreign - we were kids and did not really understand the game that well.)

Anyway, a couple years after I started playing, a friend of a friend told us he had Elder Dragon Legends that he wanted to sell. They were from Chronicles, a re-release of popular cards from Magic's early sets when the initial run had been much smaller than there was demand for. Chronicles Cards were denoted by their white borders, despite having expansion symbols (in Revised through... some much later set, "Core Sets" had white borders.)

Anyway, he had a couple of the cards, and because I liked to play Black and Blue (we had figured out limiting our decks' colors by then) and also enjoyed a bit or Red now and again, Nicol Bolas was the one I picked up.

Now, having gotten a somewhat better understanding of the game, I came to realize that making your opponent discard their hand every time you hit them with this guy was pretty damned powerful - much more than Chromium's Rampage 2 (Rampage was a short-lived keyword that gave the creature +X/+X for every creature blocking it beyond the first.)

Still, even when I stopped playing in 7th grade and then picked it up again in college for a couple years, I didn't really give Nicol Bolas much thought. Magic's story had largely been focused on the Weatherlight Saga, which sort of started in Antiquities but really became the central focus in the Weatherlight Set and then the Tempest Block. There wasn't a ton of connection between stories after the Invasion Block, and when I picked the game up again in college, the focus was very much of individual stories on different planes - Mirrodin (which to be fair was connected to what had happened in Odyssey/Onslaught blocks,) Kamigawa, and the debut of the now-legendary Ravnica.

Nicol Bolas was my star player, even if getting him on the board was very difficult. But like most figures out of the Legends expansion, I didn't really think they'd put much into his story.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising when, following my second stepping-away from the game that Nicol Bolas would arise as what is basically Magic's big bad. While the Phyrexians came back for Scars of Mirrodin (sorry Mirrodin, you are basically hell now) and the Eldrazi gave Magic its truest Lovecraftian monsters, Nicol Bolas has had his story expanded tremendously.

It appears as if that plot, which has now been going for I believe a decade, might be coming to a conclusion in the current Ravnica block. But it is really odd to see what they have done with my coolest creature. The visual redesign turned him from a wrinkly humanoid dragon sitting in his personal wizard's library into an instantly-recognizable dragon whose horns have become an icon in and of themselves.

And he's been on a ton of other cards, many of them this now-decade-old-but-still-seems-new-to-me type called Planeswalker.

So that's been funny, but then in the 25h anniversary core set (I believe,) they actually brought back all of the Elder Dragon Legends: Palladia-Mors, Chromium, Vaevictus Asmadi, Arcades Sabboth, and of course Nicol Bolas himself (and yes, those names are hardwired into my brain so I don't have to look them up.) They're all new versions of these characters with far more sensible design philosophy.

Now all they need to do is update Baron Sengir, the patriarch of my favorite vampiric minions, and I'll feel like I'm a kid again.

The End of an Era for Acquisitions Incorporated

At a small-scale Acq-Inc game at the Penny Arcade headquarters, Chris Perkins made a shocking announcement toward the end of the game - that he was going to be stepping down as Dungeon Master and allowing Jeremy Crawford to take his place going forward.

This is after eleven years and ten levels of seeing obnoxious (maybe evil?) corporate bureaucrat Omin Dran, egocentric goofball Jim Darkmagic, and a cast of other memorable characters play through the latest D&D content, starting as a promo for the then-new 4th Edition.

Acq-Inc is not going away, and Perkins is still going to run Dice, Camera, Action (along with new Acq-Inc regular and core DCA player Strix.) But we'll be seeing Crawford take over the main show, which is kind of crazy.

Jeremy Crawford is the lead rules designer on D&D, so he's no small name, but I certainly have less experience watching him DM. It'll be weird not to have Perkins behind the screen.

Like it has been for a ton of people, Acq-Inc is what really got me to try the game, and it's a big part of how I think about D&D (I was a relative latecomer to Critical Role, but that's obviously also a big model for how I like to run a game - in practice my group is not quite murder-hobos, but also perhaps not as emotionally invested as the CR group.)

In a move that appears to be pissing off a lot of purists but excites me, the group gets transported out of the multiverse entire and to Ravnica at the end of the session. I guess that answers a cosmological question I've had about how Ravnica fits in as a D&D world.

Managing Dimir Characters at the Table

Hey, have I mentioned House Dimir is my favorite Ravnica guild? I have? Ok, well anyway...

In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, each guild functions as a player background and a faction with which one can gain renown and thus acquire new privileges and rewards. House Dimir has these functions, but in addition you pick a second guild that you have infiltrated. While I feel there ought to be an option to play as one of the openly-Dimir-affiliated couriers, journalists, private investigators, or librarians, the main fantasy they are reinforcing with the background is that of the infiltrator.

A Dimir character will thus generally behave as they would in a different guild. In D&D's official Ravnica stream, the Broken Pact, for example (EARLY EPISODE SPOILERS) one of the party members is revealed to actually be a Dimir operative after appearing until then as a member of another guild. I guess I'll keep it vague, though if you know Ravnica, it's not terribly hard to guess which one it is.

But this provides a bit of a conundrum, or perhaps simply a stylistic choice for how you want to run the game.

Do you let the other players know?

Now, if the players are good at curbing their metagaming instincts, you could simply make it common knowledge and just have the players play their characters as if they don't know. In the Broken Pact, they have the advantage of having an audience to fool, so while I believe the other three players were aware, the first couple episodes treated the Dimir party member simply as if they were part of a different guild.

This is, honestly, probably the easiest way of doing it. Simply give the player occasional messages and meetings with contacts and potentially use that as a potential reveal within the party - something that will be a particularly big moment if you have an otherwise single-guild party.

A single-guild party consisting of all Dimir characters can also work quite well, and removes the need to keep things secret between players (unless you want a truly farcical level of lying and cover-ups.) Indeed, you could have a group that, to NPCs, appears to be a motley group of mixed-guild folks, only for it to turn out that it's all Dimir operatives.

But let's say you want a challenge. Maybe you want to keep it all a secret.

This starts at character creation. If you're having your session 0 with everyone present, simply announce that if a player wants to play a Dimir character, they should come tell the DM in private and simply roll their character as if they were a member of the guild they've infiltrated. Other players peering over the Dimir player's shoulders might find it surprising that their Selesnya Cleric has proficiency in stealth and deception, but that's on your Dimir player to keep on the down-low.

Where this gets particularly challenging is in play. One thing I highly recommend is out-of-game communication with your players. There's nothing in the rules that everything has to happen at the table, and so if you want to have your Dimir player receive their instructions in a way that the rest of the party doesn't know about, simply do it via text messages or in meetings outside the game.

For actions that do have to happen in-game, like using the Dimir-only cantrip Encode Thoughts, you can work out a signal ahead of time, like scratching one's temple a certain number of times.

Over the course of a long campaign, it seems like a player's party should probably eventually discover their true guild affiliation, but you should make them earn it, and allow the Dimir player to cover their tracks.

Giving your Dimir character secret objectives is a huge part of the fun of the idea - maybe there's an NPC that the party just wants to talk to, but the Dimir character has to ensure that they die, or better yet, get their memory erased. This then becomes a challenge for the Dimir character to achieve their objective without revealing what they've done.

With the rather broad spread of alignments amongst the guilds (and the potential for heroes and villains in each,) Ravnica has a great deal of potential to see players clash in their objectives and desires. But that's usually going to be more overt - a Dimir operative is going to try to achieve their own goals without anyone noticing. And that should present an interesting challenge, both for the player to do so and the DM to make it possible - and also possible to fail.

Dimir Guild Kit

So between having an excuse to hang out in my local (sort of - more that it was near the place I was returning tuxes for my best friend's wedding - Best Man duties, you know the drill) game store and a giant injection of nostalgia for Ravnica driven by the D&D book I've made definitely over 20 posts about (two series with a post for each guild) I bought the Dimir Guild Kit - one of a group of sets you can buy that include a deck of cards themed around the given guild with cards from all the Ravnica blocks, a guild-themed d20 life counter, a pin with the guild insignia, and a cardboard deck box along with a little folded note that, at least for the Dimir, has heavily redacted instructions (that are unfortunately hard to read as blue on black is not really the most legible color combination.)

The deck is of course the main event. It's ready to go (albeit after a lot of shuffling to make sure the lands and spells are mixed) and while I doubt it's going to be winning any tournaments - there's rarely more than two copies of the same card, not counting lands - it's a veritable who's who of Dimir legendaries and classic cards. You get a foil Etrata the Silencer, then a regular (but updated to current templating) Mirko Vosk, Lazav (the one from Return to Ravnica block,) Szadek, and Circu (I had Circu back in the day. He was nasty.)

Most of the cards have a Dimir sign for their expansion symbol, except for a couple of lands, I believe.

While it's not going to be the most consistent deck with its single-copies, it does look like it is going to really power you through some milling or other alternate win conditions (like Etrata.) You have a fair number of walls or other deterrents against aggressive decks, and a bit of removal as well that looks particularly suited to smaller creatures. I suspect that if your opponent doesn't have good creature removal and can't break past your defense quickly, the cumulative power of your many milling cards is going to be overwhelming, either powering up some of your creatures or just killing them in the old milling way.

Naturally with its milling theme, this deck is going to struggle against the Golgari, though there are also a few mill cards (like Circu or Dimir Doppelganger) where you can remove that advantage.

I am of course totally ignorant of the current metagame. Dimir has always tended to be a somewhat slower deck, except when it focuses on a kind of aggro-evasion theme - but even then it tends to be more careful in its aggression than, say, a Boros or Rakdos deck.

Kaldorei Vengeance and Giving the Alliance Some Story

Mists of Pandaria saw the Horde fractured - part of it remained loyal to Garrosh Hellscream, even as he descended further and further into an obsession with finding superweapons capable of destroying his enemies - both the Alliance and those disloyal to him within the Horde - and those who wished to see Thrall's vision of the Horde restored.

Horde players journeyed through Pandaria, first towing Garrosh's line but then siding with Vol'jin as the Darkspear Revolution began to combat Garrosh's frankly fascistic tendencies. It was a pretty exciting development for the game, as we had never before turned on our own faction leaders.

From an Alliance perspective, however, it was easy to feel as if you were on the sidelines.

Especially given how the Siege of Orgrimmar ended, there was a sense that the Alliance had merely assisted one faction within the Horde against another, and given what has happened relatively soon afterwards, it doesn't seem as if this effort really amounted to much. We once again have a Horde that is aggressively trying to destroy the Alliance. And this iteration of the Horde has been more successful. The destruction of Theramore was a big enough event to transform the Alliance's most passionate advocate of cross-factional peace into one of its most die-hard anti-Horde members.

On top of that, the Alliance came off as rather weak when you considered that they were essentially equal partners with a mere fraction of the Horde in fighting Garrosh's forces. If, for example, the Darkspear Revolution was forced to desperately ask for aid from the Alliance or risk being wiped out, that would have been one thing. But Vol'jin hardly even seemed all that thrilled to have the help.

We are seeing echoes of Mists in BFA, with another off-the-rails Warchief and another honorable hero of the Horde set up to become a focus for resistance against this tyranny.

While I do suspect that we're going to get a twist here that gives us a different story than a simple Garrosh 2.0, the same problem persists:

The Horde just has a more interesting story.

But that's where I think that the Darkshore warfront starts to make things a bit more interesting.

When Sylvanas and Saurfang planned the attack on Night Elf lands, (and it was really mostly Saurfang's plan, up until the burning of Teldrassil) the idea was to divide the Alliance politically. The thought was that if the Alliance would not send troops to liberate Teldrassil, the Night Elves might split from them, while if they did, the Gilneans might be angry that their lands were not liberated first.

Burning Teldrassil seemed to hamstring this plan - if the Night Elves had nothing to save there, they'd simply concentrate their efforts on other fronts. The attack meant to divide the Alliance would wind up unifying it instead.

And to a large extent that's the narrative we got in the aftermath of these events - Undercity fell thanks to this effect.

But that story seems to be shifting back toward the way it was originally planned - in 8.1, Malfurion and Tyrande launch a campaign to destroy the Horde forces in Darkshore. While Teldrassil itself is irrevocably lost, the truth is that the tree was a relatively new part of Night Elf society. Many civilians lived there because, until now, it had served as a safe harbor from the aggressive Horde. But the lands of Darkshore, Ashenvale, Winterspring, Felwood, and Hyjal are all very ancient Night Elf territory that they know quite well.

That the Night Elves have the right to fight to win back this territory is, I think, indisputable. Yes, there might be some questions about resource allocation, but I don't think Anduin or anyone else in Alliance leadership would mind gaining that territory back.

So how do you make this an interesting story?

I think you get some of the answer in the Terror of Darkshore.

Druids in WoW really trend quite strongly toward the obvious good-guy archetypes. They tend to be seen as more of the hippie-like, harmonious sort. Malfurion, of all people, has exemplified this sort of Druid. But in the cinematic we get previewing 8.1, we get to see a much scarier version of Malfurion and his Druidism. Horde forces are yanked off the road to what must be a swift and bloody end. One orc is slowly crushed to death by roots that drag him, screaming, into the earth.

Malfurion, benevolent though he usually is, is capable of gruesome violence. While the fact that it's just a bunch of Horde grunts may undercut his power, canonically Malfurion is one of the most powerful beings on Azeroth, and his anger should worry the Horde.

We also see Tyrande undergo a transformation in 8.1, embodying an aspect of Elune known as the Night Warrior.

While this transformation has an easily recognizable visual signifier - the usually glowing Night Elf eyes become black as night - we don't have a great sense of what, exactly, it entails. The Night Warrior aspect of Elune is clearly a fiercer one (it's in the name,) but I'd like to know exactly what kind of sacrifice this requires, and how it might transform those who undergo the change.

I think the problem Blizzard faces in telling this story is explaining what exactly has changed. The Night Elves have always fought to defend their lands. Merely showing that they are using violence to do so does not make the story any more complex - they've always used violence.

The point is that I think they need the Night Elves to be transgressive in some way. After what the Horde did to them, there's not much the Night Elves could do that wouldn't feel morally justified or at least understandable.

I've often remarked that if they want us to buy the Horde's constant antagonization of the Alliance, we need to actually see the Alliance commit crimes and atrocities that are not immediately offset by worse actions in the Horde.

But I also think we need to see the Night Elves committing acts that seriously alienate some of the Alliance from them. The Alliance has been in desperate need of an internal conflict so that their factional stories don't merely see them reacting to the Horde with a vague sense of moral superiority.

Guild Groups Versus Mixed Groups

If you're sick of Ravnica stuff, well, tough. Because here's another post about it!

Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica (and I think I'm going to start abbreviating it to GGR because none of those are particularly short words) gives you many suggestions on creating characters from each of the ten guilds and adventures based around them.

One thing they also suggest is how to build a party in which every member is part of the same guild.

It's an interesting concept - my inclination is of course to make a multi-guild party - I might even require it if and when I run something in the setting. On the other hand, there are certainly advantages to having a party composed entirely of same-guild members.

D&D organized many podcasts and streaming games to do one-shot adventures - ten one-shots, one for each guild. I've listened to the Dimir one and part of the Rakdos one.

Immediately, one interesting fact presents itself - standard heroics need not apply. While the Dimir group wound up doing some pretty straightforwardly good stuff (I see the Dimir self-image as morally neutral at worst, even if they wind up being evil in fact) the Rakdos group was pretty on-board for the whole murder and mayhem thing.

D&D is of course a flexible system, and there have been evil parties long before Ravnica. But the point is that if you have a single-guild group from one of the more morally questionable guilds (I still think that every guild has a share of good people, though some clearly have more than others) you can totally have a whole campaign in which the goals are evil. Given the monsters and NPCs that are affiliated with each guild, you have plenty of good or neutral antagonists for your monstrous players to slaughter.

The single-guild group seems really well-suited to a one-shot, though by necessity doing so would mean not having a chance to expose the party to the whole of the world. If you are doing a one-shot, you can easily use some of the adventures or adventure spaces in the book. I'm pretty sure that the Dimir one simply re-purposed the Golgari mansion, flipping it back right-side up and using it for some intra-guild intrigue.

There is plenty of room for distinct characters in each guild - as I said in an earlier post, if you play around with the Magic colors as an alternative or supplement to alignment, you can think of a guild's color pair as a kind of spectrum upon which your character can fall.

Still, for a long campaign, the potential conflicts of interest and inter-guild intrigue that could come from having a mixed-guild party would give tremendous fuel to a dungeon master. If you simply look at the number of contacts a four-player party would have, you have a huge stable of NPCs to build stories around. And having players in different guilds would allow you to have some players shine in situations they might not otherwise.

As an example, let's say your Abjuration Wizard is an Azorius Law Mage. They have a low charisma, being a bookish and shy individual. But if the party needs to get some file hidden somewhere deep in New Prahv's archives, you could say that the Azorius really don't care about how charismatic you are, and instead they care about how many rules and regulations you can quote. Suddenly, Persuasion, Intimidation, and Deception checks are all based on Intelligence, which your Wizard has in abundance, while your Rakdos Bard, the charming dummy who is usually the face of the group, sits back and lets the professional bureaucrat handle things.

It's a similar idea to one I saw some clever D&D commentator mention (I can't remember if it was Web DM or one of Zee Bashew's animated spellbook videos) how using extra abilities like Honor or Sanity can allow you to flip the script in similar ways.

One thing you will need to think about for a multi-guild party is giving them a story that each member will feel invested in. You can definitely put them in situations in which their philosophies and guild loyalties clash (in fact, I fell that's practically a requirement) but unless you're going with a purely episodic campaign, you'll probably want to come up with a threat that ties them together.

Obviously this can be the overstepping of one of the guilds - preferably one that none of the party members is in. Each guild has its own potential campaign-level threats (as an example, you could have the Simic achieve evolutionary perfection and unleash the Tarrasque upon Ravnica,) and simply having the party gradually uncover such a plot, maybe misdirecting by having the party chase one guild only to realize it's a plot by another one. You can definitely use the Orzhov or Golgari as really obvious villains only for it to turn out to be a red herring, potentially unveiling the true villain as someone who one would assume was good - the plot of the original Ravnica block, for example, had what was initially thought to be a Dimir plot turn out to be the machinations of the Azorius Senate's previous guildmaster, who intended to parlay the chaos into greater powers for his guild (if I recall the story correctly.)

But a threat from outside the guild is also a great reason to have the guilds cooperate. The Nephilim - ancient gods who existed prior to the guilds and very much fit the Great Old One type - could be the big bads threatening the peace. You could also bring in other multi-planar threats from the Magic multiverse like the brilliantly diabolical Elder Dragon Nicol Bolas (who is at least as powerful as Tiamat,) the Lovecraftian monsters called the Eldrazi, or potentially Magic's most storied and classic villain (ok, Nicol Bolas might arguably take that place,) the Phyrexians, a plague/people dedicated to the body-horror-fueled merging of organic and machine life.

Of course, given that Ravnica is now an official D&D setting, you could also easily search through the rogue's gallery of D&D for good extra-planar threats. Maybe Demogorgon shows up in Ravnica and you need to team up with Rakdos to show that two-headed bastard that there's only room for one demon lord in Ravnica.

If you are going with a single-guild group, a long-term campaign could see their efforts to overthrow the balance of the guilds. While that might be a tough sell for lawful guilds like the Azorius, you could easily have other guilds decide that the time to strike is now, and perhaps your campaign ends with the order of Ravnica totally overthrown.

If you want to restore some status quo after such a campaign, perhaps you allow them to achieve their triumph only to then demonstrate through catastrophic consequences that the ten guilds exist for a good reason, and then the party needs to spend the rest of the campaign cleaning up the mess they've made. Such a campaign could easily put the party in combat with the various guild leaders and would likely require the super-powerful magic that only high-level characters get access to if they do want to undo the damage.

What strikes me about Ravnica as a setting is just how easily so many different types of campaigns jump out to me. Not only is each guild a sort of genre in and of itself, but the interactions between them provide an exponentially higher number of story hooks.

Ten Years Since Wrath of the Lich King

It has been ten years since Wrath came out now, which is pretty crazy. I associate it a lot with a big move in my life - when I left the east coast after graduating college and moved out to Los Angeles.

Wrath was such an impactful expansion that it is sometimes strange to think how close it was to vanilla. At this point ten years ago, World of Warcraft itself was only as old as Warlords of Draenor is now (roughly.)

While opinions differ of course, for a large number of players, Wrath of the Lich King was WoW's best expansion for about eight years - Legion might have finally unseated it, but Wrath's legacy is huge.

Now, Wrath's content has certainly aged. Northrend tends to feel a bit tedious now, though I think that's largely due to the fact that we've had access to it for a full decade.

Wrath was both revolutionary and evolutionary. What do I mean by that?

First off, world content was improved tremendously: you can see now that questing through Outland versus questing through Northrend is a totally different experience. While Outland sends you across zones to kill every last thing in your way for low-droprate quest items, Wrath really tried to tell interesting stories with its quests. Drakuru's two-part deception and betrayal, Loken's devious plot to get you to help him trap Thorim, the whole build-up to the Wrath Gate incident, and one of my personal favorites, the haunting mystery of Matthias Lehner - all stories told through quests.

The Lich King was an incredibly iconic villain - not only did he have that Sauron-style "dark lord" archetype down to an art, but in contrast with previous villains (like Illidan, whose appearance in Legion was partially just meant to be an opportunity to let him actually be a character - and let Liam O'Brien chew the scenery in the best way,) we actually got to see the Lich King enough to realize how much of a threat he was. The Halls of Reflection dungeon sold the Lich King's power better than any other encounter I've seen, where he's just this implacable force of death inducing panic in us as we desperately try to run away.

It also gave us our first new class after vanilla's launch, the Death Knight, which has remained popular ever since (I sometimes think that if I were going to start all over again I'd main a Blood DK - thankfully my DK is my second-priority character so I still have time to play him a decent amount.)

This was also an expansion in which Blizzard started to play with difficulty. While BC had introduced 10 and 25-player raiding and heroic dungeons, Wrath added new raid difficulties to allow less hardcore players to get to see content. This was a bit of a rocky road, though. Naxxramas, which had been an infamously difficult raid during vanilla, was brought back as a very simple starter raid that left a lot of hardcore players feeling bored while they waited for Ulduar (though that patience was rewarded with a raid that is often considered the best they've ever done.) In Trial of the Crusader (admittedly one of the least popular raids they've done,) they formalized difficulties. The result (helped by the later addition of Raid Finder) is that players can see the raids without being in a committed hardcore progression guild, where once fights like Kil'jaeden (the one in Sunwell Plateau) were seen by only a tiny fraction of the players.

Wrath also introduced the dungeon finder, which admittedly has been seen as something of a mixed bag - Cataclysm would be criticized for making it feel as if there was no point in leaving Stormwind or Orgrimmar. While at max level they've clearly tried to steer away from it - Mythic dungeons, which cannot be queued for, largely play the role LFG used to - for low-level characters who want to run a dungeon, it's a blessing. Prior to dungeon finder, the chance of getting a group for, say, Uldaman, was really low (my friends and I would just run each other through low-level dungeons on our higher-level mains.)

We also got dual-spec, which of course is less relevant now given how easy it is to swap specs these days, but the amount of gold a hybrid character would have to spend to re-spec every time they wanted to solo or run a dungeon would was pretty absurd. I leveled by Paladin all the way to 80 in Prot spec, and I can tell you that soloing took a while.

It was in Wrath that we started to get lots of really interesting hints about the nature of the world, too. Some rather silly quests in Borean Tundra introduced the concept of the Curse of Flesh, which in retrospect is a huge part of Warcraft lore. The Keepers of Ulduar turn out to have been extremely important to Azeroth's history. And of course we got a much better sense of the capabilities and nature of the Old Gods when we faced the second (and last so far, though my money is on N'zoth showing up at the end of BFA) of these monstrosities.

Wrath also gave us the very first in-game cutscenes. The Wrath Gate Incident was a shocking moment, not just in the story but also as a new and cinematic way of showing major events. Wrath would also inaugurate the first raid-closing cinematic, which has now become a tradition (though Legion kicked it up a notch by giving us a full cinematic at the end of every tier raid. I assume we'll get a cinematic at the end of Dazar'alor and then after Azshara's Eternal Palace.)

More controversially, that final cinematic gave us the first really big "huh?" moment in WoW's major plot points. As the ghost of Terenas insisted that there must be a Lich King, we watched as Tirion Fordring crowned Bolvar Fordragon as the new leader of the Scourge - a move that a lot of people have speculated about and maybe doesn't make total sense (would the Scourge really be more dangerous without tactical and strategic leadership?) This also kind of became a tradition, between the similarly baffling "the dragon aspects were originally empowered to stop one of the dragon aspects" after Cataclysm to the somewhat more sensible but still questionable decision by Illidan to stay behind at the Seat of the Pantheon (is he really contributing that much with all the other Titans collectively locking down Sargeras there?)

We got an evolving environment with the Argent Tournament grounds in northern Icecrown in a plot that unfolded over a couple patches, which we hadn't really had before.

The point is, it was a big expansion. The nostalgia a lot of people have for classic WoW is something I might feel a bit more for Wrath of the Lich King. That being said, in the past decade we've come a long way. There are some moves I've been less of a fan of (particularly the move away from currency-based gearing toward pure RNG, though it looks like Blizzard is finally starting to swing the pendulum back that way in 8.1.) But overall I think that the game has improved in myriad ways.

I can't say Wrath was the most innovative expansion - Burning Crusade probably takes that cake - but between the great story, far greater class balance than ever before (in Vanilla and BC there were certain classes you just couldn't DPS with,) and accessibility all combined to make a really great expansion. It's also the expansion that led to the high watermark of WoW subscriptions - while it technically hit that mark during Cataclysm, the precipitous dropoff during Cata suggests that most of that continued rise was out of the expectations set by Wrath.

As a veteran player, I really do think that Legion finally unseated Wrath as the best expansion, but I still think the Scourge are the best villains the Warcraft universe has ever had, and Arthas as the Lich King was the perfect mix of tragedy and menace. Wrath was the period I found my current guild, and I can look back on it with great fondness.

So happy 10th Anniversary, Wrath of the Lich King!

Sylvanas and the Wrath Gate

In a recent interview with Alex Afrasiabi, WoW's Creative Director, he responded to players finding Sylvanas' even darker turn to be out of character by pointing out that she ordered the Wrath Gate incident.

For those of us who remember it (the quests that followed were broken by Cataclysm's revamp, so they were only available during Wrath) that's a pretty shocking reveal.

Here's how it played out back then: Quests in Dragonblight ultimately led to the cutscene as they do now, but afterward players were sent by Alexstrasza to bring Saurfang his son's armor and Varian Bolvar's shield.

The Alliance was sent on a diplomatic mission to Orgrimmar (along with Jaina, who was still a staunch advocate of peace between the factions) while the Horde went back to talk with then-Warchief Thrall.

What they discovered in Orgrimmar were Forsaken refugees and a city on lockdown. Sylvanas was in exile after Varimathras and Grand Apothecary Putress had kicked off a coup in the Undercity right as the Wrath Gate incident went down. Sylvanas had fled with her life and those who were loyal to her.

Both factions then besieged the Undercity - the Horde attacking its front gates and the Alliance assaulting the back-door sewer entrance. The Alliance mission was to find and kill Putress, discovering many of the Apothecary Society's horrors along the way. Meanwhile, the Horde made for the throne room where they confronted Varimathras, who was attempting to open many portals to the Twisting Nether to allow the Legion to invade.

After both fights were complete, Varian, disgusted by what he found in the Undercity's Apothecary Quarter, charged into the throne room and declared that he could not abide by the Horde's tolerance for these atrocities - prisoners kept in cages and murdered with blight, horrifying carrion worms bred in the sewers, and abominations being manufactured from the bodies of the dead. Considering Thrall responsible - he was Warchief, after all - Varian attacked. It was only when Jaina froze everyone in place and then forcibly teleported the Alliance forces out of the city that the battle was over, but the war that wouldn't end until the Siege of Orgrimmar had basically started.

Up until this point, Sylvanas seemed to have plausible deniability. She was clearly tolerant of her apothecaries' heinous actions, but the attack on combined Alliance/Horde forces at the Wrath Gate seemed plausibly against her wishes given that they culminated in a coup against her. Varimathras had a clear motivation to stab her in the back, and Sylvanas does not seem likely to condone the use of her throne room to summon in the demons of the Burning Legion.

It's possible, of course, that Afrasiabi merely meant that she had ordered the development of the blight, rather than telling Putress to kill Horde soldiers, which makes her culpable if not precisely responsible.

If she did order it, though, what was the motivation? She did have to flee into a brief exile after Varimathras took over the city. Did Varimathras take advantage of the situation and attempt to outplay her?

Or is it possible that Sylvanas outplayed everyone?

Varimathras was Sylvanas' chief lieutenant prior to this, but he was a demon and she had to assume he was always plotting to betray her. Is it possible that she orchestrated all of this to give her an excuse to destroy him? It seems a risky ploy, though. Was she relying on both factions attacking his loyalists? Was the coup merely a way to filter out any potential traitors? Sylvanas clearly fears betrayal - see her massacre of her own people in Arathi Highlands - so maybe this was effectively a big purge.

Still, I worry that this development - which feels suspiciously like a Retcon, regardless of what Afrasiabi claims - robs Sylvanas of her nuance. Especially as a racial leader, Sylvanas is most interesting when she has redeeming qualities to off-set her villainy. That moment of vulnerability in Undercity, not to mention drawing a line between what is acceptable for the Forsaken to do versus what is not, makes both Sylvanas and the Forsaken more interesting. It's part of why the whole "Burn it" moment felt so jarring - we had expected Sylvanas to be a bad person, but not so unambiguously evil.

What to Bring to Ravnica

I have now read Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica cover-to-cover. It does a great job of introducing the world of Ravnica to D&D, providing five new playable races, two new subclasses, ten guilds that serve as new character backgrounds as well as factions that can provide some significant rewards over the course of a campaign.

The book provides a lot of interesting ideas for long-term plots as well as really fantastic resources for one-shots (or episodic adventures that could fit into a larger campaign.)

But what can we bring to Ravnica that isn't there?

My first thought is races: Ravnica has merfolk and viashino - both Magic standbys. Their merfolk (who didn't appear in the original set - Vedalken were their main blue non-human humanoid race) are the variety that has legs and is amphibious rather than waterbound, so what I would do is simply include the Tritons from Volo's Guide to Monsters. I might alter the lore a bit - while the Tritons tend toward Lawful Good, Merfolk in Magic settings tend toward Neutrality (perhaps leaning toward Lawful.)

Additionally, Viashino are represented in some of the book's adventure hooks as lizardfolk, and I would again just emphasize a bit of the different flavor. While Lizardfolk are pretty emphatically true neutral as described in Volo's, the Viashino, being a Red race, are very much on the chaotic side of the alignment system.

There are monster lists broken down by guilds that mention stuff in this book as well as the Monster Manual, and also include a few Volo's and Mordenkainen's creatures as well, so you're actually pretty decently covered for that.

One thing you might consider doing if you're feeling really ambitious is to convert the recent Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into a Ravnica adventure. Swap out the Zhentarim for House Dimir, make the Cassalanters into Orzhov oligarchs, make the Breghan D'aerth a squadron of Golgari Ochran assassins, and perhaps make the Xanathar "Guild" a guildless gang with ambitions to be recognized as a true guild of Ravnica.

Another thing you might try is to expand into other Magic worlds. Using planar travel (or teleportation magic - I can't remember if Plane Shift allows travel between two separate worlds of the Material Plane) you might have your party leave Ravnica (maybe searching for Jace so that he'll come back and do his freaking job) and track him across other worlds like Innistrad, Zendikar, or Dominaria. There are Plane Shift articles for each of these worlds (and more) that are sort of precursors to the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica that could be very useful tools in this.

Jace does not have a stat block in the book, despite his important role in the world. I'd recommend that if you're going to have a planeswalker character, you'll definitely want to give them a high challenge rating (I think 20 at a minimum) and obviously give them the ability to cast plane shift innately at least once a day (if not at will.) Any planeswalker is probably going to be some variety of spellcaster, though not all have to be pure casters, like Gideon Jura is probably a paladin.

Plane-traveling villains from D&D might also find themselves in Ravnica. While there's no area equivalent to Chult as described in Tomb of Annihilation, I could definitely see Acererak building a horrible dungeon within the Undercity (though I think the most fervent Rakdos cultists would probably think it was just a really good fun-house.)

I also think you could re-skin a lot of Ravenloft adventures (like all of Curse of Strahd) as some kind of Dimir mind-prison - escaping a domain of dread might all be a kind of mental struggle against a Dimir Lobotomist trying to mess with your brain.

EDIT: Another thing I thought of! Slivers! In Magic, Slivers are a super-invasive symbiotic species that are kind of single-clawed serpents with horned heads that each provide their own enhancement to their fellow slivers. For example, a Winged Silver gives all slivers (including itself) the ability to fly, while an Armored Sliver might increase all slivers' health or armor by a certain amount (both values are amalgamated into "toughness" in Magic.) You could build a really interesting encounter in which the party needs to quickly slay the slivers providing the most dangerous abilities or perhaps have a fight against a very simple creature grow far more complex as more slivers with new abilities join the fray. This would require some careful planning and design work, but might wind up being really fun.

The book does what it needs to - it's not an adventure or particular story, but instead gives you a broad and diverse world that you will be free to fill with your own stories.

I hope that we see more of these sourcebooks come out (perhaps for more traditional D&D settings like Dark Sun, but updated for 5E.) But even if I'm very committed to my homebrew setting, I feel a very strong urge to run a short, couple-session adventure set in Ravnica. And if I can find someone willing to DM a full Ravnica campaign, I already have a strong concept for a Dimir Vedalken Enchantment Wizard ready to go.

Now That We Have the Book: Alignment, Colors, and Ravnica

Magic is defined by its five colors. No game mechanic has been more important to the function of the game (ok, maybe lands and mana - though that's closely related) and it has given Magic a wonderful richness in flavor. Every world has these five elements, but the roles that each plays can be very different.

In particular, I like the fact that, while some colors might be seen as the "good guys" more often and some (one in particular) might be seen as the "bad guys," this is not a hard and fast rule.

Take the Kamigawa Block, for example, where the bad guy of the story was the very White-mana Lord Konda and its hero (admittedly more of an antihero) was the Black-mana Toshiro Umezawa.

Perhaps it is because I played Magic long before I played D&D, and perhaps it's because I tended to play Black, but I've always found the idea of nuanced and unexpected behaviors in fantasy creatures to be very cool. While even in Magic a demon is extremely unlikely to be a good guy, it's technically possible, just as an angel can be a villain (ok, I feel like this is less surprising given that the whole "fallen angel" archetype is pretty hardwired into Western culture.)

D&D has a long and storied history of its two-axis alignment system, which I've heard described as the moral and ethical scales (as someone who has always held ethical integrity as a great virtue, I realize I'm pretty Lawful) and that system allows for things like its sixteen outer planes and provided distinctions for beings like Devils as opposed to Demons, giving you interesting consequences like the fact that you can technically have a mutually beneficial deal with a devil if you've got a good enough lawyer to draft the contract.

But again, Magic is my first fantasy game - hell, it might be the thing that really got me into fantasy in the first place - and I love the five colors so much.

So it got me thinking: should a Ravnica-based game use them instead of alignment?

In a sense, if a player isn't guildless, they are picking two colors simply by virtue of the way the guilds were first constructed. As amazing as the flavor of the guilds is, one can remember that their entire genesis was purely a mechanical one - a way to define the personality of each two-color combination.

The guilds blend their colors seamlessly, for the most part, and part of the genius of the card set was that it felt like MTG had just doubled its colors.

As such, though, I think that you might have to limit a character's color options if they are going to serve as an alignment to single colors. That nearly halves the options you'd get in D&D's classic nine-alignment grid, which is less great.

On the other hand, the combination of a single-color alignment and a guild choice would provide some nuance.

Take two Boros characters. One might be a White Boros Paladin, whose intentions are all totally altruistic with an attitude that "I fight today so that there will be peace tomorrow." On the other hand, you might have a Red Boros Wizard who feels a visceral thrill in battling agains the forces of evil. Thus, within the same guild you could have some serious tension as to what their true purpose is - or less dramatically, you'd simply have some different attitudes within the guild.

As another example, a Red Rakdos Swashbuckler Rogue might really just want freedom and the ability to express themselves, whereas a Black Rakdos Fiendish Warlock might really enjoy the power they feel by breaking other people under torture.

Now, I'll confess that I nearly wrote in the last paragraph that the Rogue might be Chaotic Good while the Warlock is Chaotic Evil.

Still, I do think there's some value in thinking about the colors that make up the guilds, even if the book intentionally makes no mention of the "color pie" so as not to make D&D veterans worry they're going to have to learn a bunch of new Magic rules (they don't.)

At the very least, you're going to get a solid way of saying what kind of guild member you are. I think it would also be a cool way of playing a character who is clearly in the wrong guild, and working through that problem by maybe realizing they need to change. I imagine a Blue character who joins the Boros (maybe because their family or friends were staunch Boros members) expecting to have a desk job where they can analyze evidence and track down leads. When this character discovers that the Boros are much more about marching around, fighting, and projecting their righteous will across the city, they'll probably find themselves depressed - the nerd in a guild of jocks.

Maybe over the course of this character's adventures, they come to realize that they're in the wrong place. Perhaps they decide to instead apply for the Azorius Senate, where things are much more proper and someone's intellect is respected as much as their brawn. Or perhaps they find themselves contacted by the Dimir, and thanks to resentment they've felt against their muscle-headed colleagues, they decide to start siphoning information about Boros troop movements to their Dimir superior.

Or they decide to become a scientist instead and join either the Simic or the Izzet.

Naturally, I think that developing a character beyond the simple descriptors of alignment, traits, ideal, bonds, and flaws is a good thing to do - every character I plan to play (I've only really played one - DM problems, amirite?) has a couple-page backstory (can you tell I like to write?) So there's no reason that standard D&D alignment needs to clash with this color alignment.

Some combinations would be tricky, though. Could you be a Lawful Neutral Red character? (Again, Boros kind of solves this, where you could have someone who is lawful, but zealous and passionate about it.) What about a Neutral Good Black character? (Very tricky, though I could see a benevolent necromancer in such a role.)

Still, it might be a way to add both a little more Magic flavor to your D&D game and also add a little shade and nuance to the way you think about your character.

How to Plunder Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica

I love the Ravnica setting and I was really excited to see it made an official D&D plane (even if that raises very tricky problems about the multiverse(s).) But given that I'm in the middle of a years-long campaign (they're getting close to level 9!) in my own homebrew setting, I don't know when I'll have a chance to truly have a bunch of guilded players adventuring around the Tenth District.

So what can we steal from this book for our own settings or perhaps established settings that we're playing in?

First off, I think you can justify things in two ways: one is that these elements just appear in different forms in other settings - it's just coincidence or some unknown natural law that brings, say, Vedalken into existence in multiple planes (much as it does in the worlds of Magic.) Another is that you can have Ravnicans arrive in your worlds through planar travel. Given how important (and missing) Jace Beleren is on Ravnica, you could easily have Ravnicans arrive on another world of the prime material plane searching for him or possibly hoping to expand their guild's influence elsewhere in the multiverse (remember that the guilds, being powerful institutions in a planet-sized city are likely to be larger and more powerful than most empires.)

But what do I recommend taking?

Let's start with the obvious:

GGtR has new races, class options, and monsters/NPCs. Allowing players to play as Minotaurs, Centaurs, Loxodons, Simic Hybrids, or Vedalken in a different setting could give them just the option they've been looking for. You might need to re-skin these races if you're just stealing the stats without creating a canonical connection between the worlds (particularly the rather guild-specific Simic Hybrids.)

Monsters can of course easily be re-skinned, not that they need too much work, and of course NPCs could fit with certain archetypes that exist elsewhere in fantasy. There are also a handful of spells and magic items that you could incorporate into the game as well.

One invaluable thing that the book provides is a set of chapters on guild-based adventures that contain a map for a mini-dungeon (something you could easily do in one sitting) for each guild. These spaces are perfect for many different kinds of adventures and provide a number of suggestions that, again, could work within those archetypes and genres.

Finally, I think that the use of factions and renown is expanded upon in interesting ways in this book. While Waterdeep: Dragon Heist of course also uses the system to flesh out the city (it's either clever strategy on the part of Wizards or a happy coincidence that they released an urban adventure book and Ravnica as a new setting so close to one another. You could probably translate Waterdeep: Dragon Heist into Ravnica: Zino Heist pretty easily.

But to the point: if you want to play with the idea of players getting serious rewards for working with a faction in your world, take a look at the ideas they have in here. The Contacts tables also provide a lot of inspiration for NPCs that are important to the player characters, giving each member of the "main cast" a number of "supporting characters" that will provide you with a lot of interesting NPCs and always give you easy ways to start up an adventure.

One thing I really like is the idea that earning a certain rank in a guild gives you the means to live a certain lifestyle. You can thus focus on the money earned in adventuring to be spent on adventuring while not having to worry about paying for the inn or food.

While I'm hoping that I'll be able to run a true Ravnica-set game at some point in the not-too-distant future, I'm sure that elements from the book will make their way into my Sarkon setting. I already have a few factions that could easily use Rakdos, Dimir, and Orzhov elements (what can I say? I play black.)

First Look at Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica

I got Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica today!

I'm only a bit of the way through it - right now I'm going through each of the guilds, and their mechanical function is becoming apparent:

Guilds combine player backgrounds and factions to become something as definitional to a player character as their race and class. While you can play guildless characters (using other backgrounds,) I think that any Ravnica game I ran (at least the first one) would require that everyone choose a guild.

The book also gives guidelines of what sort of class combinations would make sense for mono-guild parties, though again, I'd encourage players to be a little more of a motley crew (the Rakdos member would probably wear actually motley.)

Guilds come with background-like benefits, but they also function as factions with a renown system. While I think that system ought to be optional in other settings, the role of the guilds in Ravnica is so important that I think that any proper Ravnica game should include it.

One thing I'd be concerned about is that a mixed-guild group might find it hard to advance to the higher tiers of renown within their respective guilds. That might simply be the price they pay and reflect the difficulties of reaching across guild lines, but I think a DM might become a little more generous with the amount of renown that they award for completing different tasks.

These rewards range from friendly NPCs who assist you on official guild business or magical items to bigger story-based things like having enough of a reputation to talk with the highers-up in your guild. There's no explicit method to become the Guildmaster yourself, but you can become quite a major figure in your guild, such that the guildmaster might know you personally and even seek out your advice.

While very few D&D races exist in Ravnica (basically just humans, elves, half-elves - which makes sense given the previous two - and goblins,) there are myriad additional races they've introduced: the blue-skinned intellectuals called Vedalken, the biomancy-enhanced Simic Hybrids, Minotaurs, Centaurs, and elephant-people called Loxodons.

I'd recommend allowing Tritons (from Volo's) to work as Ravnica's Merfolk (in Ravnica, Merfolk are amphibious and have legs, like Tritons) and allow Lizardfolk (also from Volo's) to serve as Viashino (who are basically lizard-people.) I'd even suggest digging through the Plane Shift articles like the one for Zendikar or Ixalan that have vampires as a playable race, as you'll find such bloodsuckers (or mind-suckers) within the Orzhov and Dimir guilds.

There's so much ground to cover in this book, and I've really only scratched the surface.

There is actually a section like my character options posts from a week or two ago, giving players good recommendations for classes and class options based on their guild. The book is a bit more conservative with its class recommendations, such that some guilds even lack any healing-capable classes, suggesting instead that they use alchemists to provide healing potions (though this ceases to be a problem if you have a mixed-guild party.)

There are obviously a lot of ways you could go about character creation here, but I really think that starting with the guild is a good choice. From there you can pick a race and class (for which they have recommendations) and move on.

One fun thing is that guilds each have guild spells that get added to the list of spell options for anyone with Spellcasting or Pact Magic. Most are existing but flavorfully-appropriate spells, but there are a handful of new ones, like the Dimir-only cantrip "Encode Thoughts," which creates a little ethereal strip of parchment with your current thoughts (or those of someone whose mind you are reading with magic) encoded into it that can then be read by others who know the spell.

Again, I'm only a couple chapters in, but I'm really excited about this book. The Dimir Operative background feature is one that I was literally laughing out loud about - you become a member of a second guild, but are secretly a Dimir Operative who has infiltrated it - and it encourages you not to tell the rest of the party! (If you've been watching the Broken Pact stream, I am pretty sure that College of Whispers bard Velma is actually Dimir, as opposed to Orzhov.)

Leafing through the rest of the book, there is a section about the Tenth District, which is where most of the guilds have their headquarters, as well as the Chamber of the Guildpact, which is the true center of Ravnica's government and where the Living Guildpact, Jace Beleren, has his office (as a planeswalker, Jace is almost never in, which means that his magical ability to keep the guilds in balance is usually not functioning, leading to greater tension in the city.)

There are also suggested story hooks and maps to buildings, sorted by guild. There is also a short adventure designed to show off the city in which a low-level party deals with a goblin gangster.

There are also magic items, including a Mizzium Apparatus that replicates the Wizard's School of Invention from Unearthed Arcana that didn't make it into the book proper.

While perhaps not quite on the scale of Mordenkainen's or Volo's, there are a fair number of monster and NPC stat blocks that should be invaluable in fleshing out the world. Most of these beings are affiliated with particular guilds, but of course a lot of stuff in the Monster Manual can get mixed in as well. There are stat blocks for each of the guildmasters, which should all provide challenging boss encounters for high-level parties - the highest challenge rating is Niv-Mizzet, at 26, while others like the Obzedat Ghost Council is a group of 5 CR 8 ghosts (but likely any encounter with them will involve many minions to protect them - including Orzhov Thrulls who are designed to intercept attacks.)

Of course, given the players' relationships with these guilds, any of these creatures could just as easily serve as allies instead of enemies, and the proportion of stat blocks that belong to NPCs rather than monsters is quite high. Indeed, as one ascends in rank within their guild, they can often get several NPC followers who will help them with guild business.

Given that Ravnica is becoming a true D&D setting, I recommend each Dungeon Master make it their own, potentially throwing in elements from other worlds - maybe they've used planar travel to get there or perhaps your version of Ravnica is different than the canon one. Tieflings would make great Rakdos performers, and I could totally imagine a Beholder being a high-level operative for House Dimir. Like I said earlier, a lot of D&D stuff can be re-skinned to work for Ravnica. The Tarrasque's stat block could function for one of the ancient, pre-guild gods of the plane known as the Nephilim, and its arrival within the biggest, densest city in the multiverse (unless that's Sigil) would be a catastrophe of campaign-capping proportions.

I'm still reading (since I started writing this post I've moved into the "city layout" part of the book,) and so I'll have some additional thoughts I'm sure. I'd be very excited to run a game set here, though there will be a lot for DMs to keep track of. I highly recommend having a prominent place in your notes to keep track of players' renown with their guilds, and finding ways to regularly award it to them - though this is something that can be spread out over the course of a campaign, so maybe it's best if it's a slow trickle.

I think you can probably build a campaign that is very episodic in nature by simply coming up with tasks for the party to do for their various guilds. But naturally I think it'll be more fun if there's something bigger brewing. Given the differences in alignment and flavor among player characters, I really recommend tailoring the story to the party. My inclination is always going to be to fill things with mysterious intrigue - classic Dimir stuff - but if your party is a group of Gruul, Rakdos, and maybe Izzet, you might instead focus on their anarchic struggle against an oppressive government - the Azorius making for ideal villains.

Personally I think that it'll be best if your party is composed of very different guilds - think something like Selesnya, Rakdos, Izzet, and Dimir - and play up the tension between their competing philosophies. This will likely force you to think carefully about who your campaign's big villain is, to come up with something that all four such players would consider a threat that needed to be stopped.

Naturally, just because a player is a member of a guild does not mean you can't have villains within those very guilds. Golgari are easy, as there is always a bit of backstabbing and intraguild conflict, but any guild can potentially have corrupt or misguided members in its ranks.

Anyway, I'll talk more about story once I've read what they have to say about it.

Nazjatar and Replayability in Zones

Blizzard has talked about how they want 8.2's new zone, Nazjatar, to feel like a place that is endlessly replayable. In WoW's long history, we've had a number of zones added in later patches that are meant to provide max-level content that isn't dungeons or raids or PvP.

While the curated experience of a dungeon or raid (and mechanically, the two are basically the same concept) is something WoW is famous for doing very, very well, its focus on the world itself has declined over time. Cataclysm and Warlords of Draenor were two expansions in which players felt that there was little reason to leave capital cities and garrisons, respectively, because the content that really mattered was all in instances.

We've seen experiments and developments in the past that led to more outdoor engagement. I think one of Legion's great strengths was the introduction of the World Quest system - an update to daily quests that felt less repetitive and gave players greater choice - you could simply do four world quests in a zone to get the emissary cache, and choose which among those four you were interested in, or you could knock out every quest in the zone for rewards and reputation if you were in the groove.

I still think world quests are a really good system, but they aren't perfect. For one thing, the limitation on them - that there are only so many world quests up at a time - ironically makes them feel more mandatory (I think there's a whole post to be written about how weekly or daily caps are meant to be maximums but often wind up feeling like minimums) and a lot of the time there's little sense of story progression or stakes to them - why, for example, is Storm's Wake just as happy that I heard a story about Loh the Tortollans were telling me when I could have been defending the town from marauding Horde who are going around murdering civilians?

The most successful unlimited world content I think they've done is the Timeless Isle. And aside from my ears perking up any time there's anything to do with time travel or time anomalies in World of Warcraft (Bronze Dragonflight is the best dragonflight) there actually wasn't a ton that made the Timeless Isle all that obviously good. There were practically no new art assets and very little story (even if we eventually discovered that the stuff we were getting for Kairozdormu turned out to cause way bigger problems in the long run) but it still wound up being fun.

Rare enemies came with some really interesting designs - the ghost ship, for example, was really cool. While there were daily and weekly quests that got you the biggest contributions to player power, there was a sense that you could just go around the island and keep playing and know that you were still contributing somewhat to your power.

One of WoW's tensions is between intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. The joy of pulling off your rotation perfectly and seeing big numbers flying at the screen, taking down a new raid boss, or wrecking someone in PvP are all joys you feel in the moment, as you are playing - what is called an intrinsic reward. Getting gear and reputation rewards, earning toys and mounts and titles for challenging feats or persistent grinding is a reward where it's less about joy in the moment than satisfaction once you've earned it, and that's called an extrinsic reward.

WoW has always been focused a lot on the latter, but when it is intrinsically enjoyable, players are going to be happiest. The thing is, because the extrinsic rewards are such a focus on the game, Blizzard has this problem where they can come up with fun game systems and modes, but players feel a weird sense that they are wasting their time by doing them if the rewards aren't right. Take island expeditions - while I do think some work could be done to make them a little more varied in terms of the things you're getting azerite from, I think their biggest problem is that the rewards are really not that interesting. Azerite as a resource is so obscured by other issues (like finding the piece of azerite gear with the correct traits) that just getting a chunk of azerite that you could easily earn through other game systems makes the Islands feel sort of inconsequential.

Warfronts I think do a better job here, because there are interesting transmog appearances and sets to earn, not to mention decent gear that is a lot easier to evaluate than "a big chunk of azerite."

Anyway, one important aspect to how unlimited content ought to work is that there needs to be a sense that a player is working toward something even if they're done with their daily quests or whatever the zone has.

But I also think that experimentation in the gameplay is important.

On the Timeless Isle, the most exciting rare mob was the ghost ship. Yes, Hu'lon had a cool mount that never dropped (for me at least,) but the ghost ship was A: unlike any other attackable object we've seen in the game and B: really changed the environment, giving players water-walking and providing a challenge that really required a raid's worth of players to attack it.

Dynamic events I think would contribute a great deal to making Nazjatar interesting. There should be big, zone-shaking creatures that change the feel of the zone while you're adventuring within it. Maybe some C'thraxx shows up and suddenly a wave of faceless ones start moving through the zone.

I'd love to see bases and points of interest that can be captured, and that as long as your faction (or maybe just the players versus the Naga) controls it, everyone gets a buff in the zone. But the Naga are fighting back with ferocity, and perhaps endless waves assault these locations, growing more and more powerful until it inevitably falls, requiring players to assault it again.

Giving rewards coming and going for this sort of dynamic event is also a good idea - if there's a currency for "relinquished" gear, you might get a big burst when you take one of these camps and then earn more each time you wipe out a wave - getting more and more of the currency as each wave gets more powerful, such that an organized raid that is capable of holding off raid-boss-like foes along with elite adds could be getting massive amounts of this currency until you get to the point where even a group of mythic raiders ultimately has to call a retreat.

One bit of world content that I thought was profoundly cool was the pre-Legion invasions in Westfall, Dun Morogh, Azshara, Hillsbrad Foothills, Tanaris, and Northern Barrens. I actually liked them more than the later Broken Isles invasions. Despite liking World Quests, I felt that the utterly free-form nature of the original Legion invasions worked really well to give a sense that we were dealing with an unexpected and unpredictable threat (I'm also always happy for them to use old zones to give that "close to home" feeling and raise the stakes.)

I loved that the nature of the invasion meant you could either join a big group wiping out massive demonic hordes or you could go to the more remote parts of the zone and find small clusters - there's a place in the western part of Westfall where a simple road runs next to a tree, and there were always a couple demons hiding behind the tree. Something about the aesthetics of this very normal little road - one you could imagine a kid walking back from school along - being threatened by little wyrmtongue demons really made all my protective paladin instinct kick in.

Now, dynamic environments are great to keep a zone feeling fresh. I will say that on the other hand, one of my favorite things in Legion was Suramar. To a large extent, the success of Suramar was that they took a max-level zone and treated it like other zones. Leveling zones tend to have full quest chains with a story that progresses over the course of its quests. Suramar was no different, except that you started it only at the level cap.

Another of WoW's issues has always been that the story is front-loaded - once you've leveled up, there's little left to do except go into the dungeons and raids and kill the bad guys.

That's something that's been getting a lot better, starting in Mists of Pandaria. But I think Suramar was the best example yet - before we went into Nighthold, we got two complex and interesting chapters to the story of the Dusk Lily Rebellion - literally starting the whole thing with just you and Thalyssra and eventually rallying most of the city to overthrow Elisande, which then led to a huge raid. (And the Nightborne abandoning us to go hang out with the Blood Elves, grumble grumble.)

I was, to be honest, pretty disappointed that the War Campaign in BFA was not as involved, complex, and frankly long as the Suramar stories. What we got was instead something more like the chapters that unfolded on Argus - interesting, but really just a couple of sporadic chapters rather than a rich and ongoing story.

Now, can the dynamic world and the rich ongoing story coexist? One advantage to being light on story is that you can have parts of the world change significantly for things like world quests without disrupting player's engagement. If you were on a quest to get keys off of naga soldiers to free an NPC from their prisons but then all the Naga there were dead and there was a big sea-monster in their place because of some world quest, it wouldn't feel great.

So I don't want to be asking conflicting things here.

Still, I think I'm going to be watching the development of Nazjatar with great interest. The idea of it - an island existing within a big rift in the ocean, with titanic walls of water surrounding the zone on all sides - is really cool.

House Dimir Story Hooks

House Dimir has been around as long as the other guilds, but until relatively recently (I can't remember how long it has been in the in-universe timeline, but the reveal was part of the first Ravnica block) it was a total secret. Rumors may have existed, but the public generally considered there to be nine guilds in Ravnica, and presumably didn't think in terms of Magic's color pie to realize that they were missing a Black and Blue guild.

For so long the Dimir have existed as the ultimate hidden conspiracy. A clandestine organization that employs stealthy spies and assassins as well as spellcasters who are capable of erasing a target's memory, the Dimir have honed their secrecy to a lethal edge.

Secrets define the Dimir, and even now, in an era where the Dimir have a public face, there's still a sort of tendency in Ravnica to pretend they don't exist.

Fun story: ever since I got a Royal Assassin in my first 60-card, Revised Edition pack of Magic cards in 1993 or maybe 1994, I've been a fan of black. I got a Lord of Atlantis in another pack soon after, and blue was always my favorite color, so I started playing a Blue Black deck (once I figured out that you should actually stick to fewer than five colors unless you had some real tools to make that work.) I added red once I got a copy of (the Chronicles version of) Nicol Bolas, but Blue Black tended to be my favorite color combo. When Ravnica: City of Guilds came out, I forced myself to start with the colors I played the least of (this was once I started playing Magic Online,) and so I went with the Red and White Boros. But then I started to see the flavor of House Dimir and while I liked Boros a lot, I just had to make a control/evasion deck which I called "The House Always Wins." It didn't always win, but it was one of my most consistently powerful decks. But I fell in love with the flavor of House Dimir, and I think it's had a profound effect on my writing. Anyway...

The Dimir have been outed, but the public face they have crafted provides many good story hooks for an adventure or campaign.

First off, I think that two genres function very well with the Dimir as a major element. The first, and perhaps most obvious, is that of a Film Noir detective story.

And I'm talking here about the Dimir serving as allies, or perhaps such stories working with a Dimir player character. See, the thing about being an ancient conspiracy that controls all knowledge is that there is no one better at uncovering the truth than the Dimir.

In Ravnican society, the Dimir can act as couriers and librarians. But in my version of the world, I'd add private detectives as well as journalists - indeed, I'd probably have a newspaper called the Observer (with a Dimir symbol as the O) as a popular publication within the city. Because the Dimir have agents everywhere, they are uniquely positioned to expose corruption in the other guilds.

It is ironic in some ways, but the guild that keeps the most secrets is the best at unveiling those of other guilds.

An investigation into anything from police brutality within the Boros to embezzlement in the Orzhov, or possibly much larger conspiracies that threaten the plane itself, would be a great plot to involve the Dimir in.

Noir works great for the petty stuff, but the genre that I think works even better for the Dimir is the conspiracy thriller.

Stuff like Three Days of the Condor, the Parallax View, or even the nonfictional All the President's Men are great inspiration for this sort of plot. Indeed, Deep Throat would be a fantastic inspiration for a Dimir operative who is friendly to the party. Or you could have that hypothetical Dimir newspaper be the equivalent of the Washington Post, taking down a corrupt leader who has been covering up their crimes.

But this is a fantasy setting, and so I suggest you also get into far crazier conspiracies. The X-Files is a good reference point.

The thing that's great about the Dimir is that they are both capable of being the guild fighting to expose the grand conspiracy (like in the current block, where they're taking the lead on opposing Nicol Bolas' attempts to place his agents in leadership positions of the guilds) while also being a perfectly good conspiracy for the party to expose.

Dimir villains can be a ton of fun - between shapechangers, necromancers, and masters of illusion, enchantment, and divinations magic, the Dimir are going to keep your party paranoid and always leave them wondering if what they are actually doing is all by the House's designs.

The fact that the guildmaster is a shapechanger means that even if you have your campaign-ending final boss fight against Lazav, you could easily imply that either what you fought wasn't the real Lazav or that Lazav wasn't even truly the guildmaster, and that there is someone else pulling the strings from higher up (such as the ghost of the vampire Szadek, the guild's parun (founding guildmaster) who died in the first Ravnica block.)

I would recommend that if you want the Dimir to show up as major villains (or even allies) in your campaign, you should build up slowly to them. Dimir operatives infiltrate every other guild as a matter of course, and having a grand reveal in which several seemingly unrelated and friendly NPCs turn out to be Dimir could be a great moment in the game.

A Dimir villain might also turn out to be using the party to do something good, and is simply playing the villain in order to spur them to action. Fake-outs will play well - I imagine a party finally arriving at Duskmantle, the secret headquarters of the guild, only to discover that after a huge effort to find this mythical place, they realize that it's actually a fake that was constructed to lure them into a trap.

Environments:

As the Blue and Black guild, Dimir lands are Islands and Swamps. Islands, as we've said, translate into canals and aqueducts in Ravnica. Foggy docks and perhaps canal-side cafes where operatives meet to speak in code with one another are great "island" locations for the Dimir. (I'm also really found of the idea of a bookshop with secret back rooms hidden by bookshelves.) Their "swamps," which take the form of undercity sewers, are likely either nondescript and mundane but with hidden passages to actual meeting places, or they might be cavernous spaces that seem totally abandoned but hide functional buildings among the rubble of previous ages of the city.

Second only to the Golgari, the Dimir know the Undercity well. But while the Golgari use it to hide their massive numbers and wage civil wars that the rest of the city doesn't even know about, the Dimir primarily use it because the remoteness and the darkness allows them to hide their operations. The Dimir have some undead (typically skeletons and ghosts) that work for them, but they also have what in Magic are called Horrors, and generally translate to aberrations in D&D terms. Unspeakable and incomprehensible beings are the perfect sort of creature to work for a guild that prefers to play things close to the vest.

Izzet League Story Hooks

I was good in the last series of entries and avoided my urge to save my favorite for last, but here, in the penultimate story hook post (I'll confess that part of the reason for my rapid updates yesterday was election anxiety - but this isn't a politics blog) I'm going to talk about the Izzet League and save their fellow Grixis guild (I didn't play during the Alara block so Shards feel less intuitive to me than Guilds) for the final spot.

If you're familiar with World of Warcraft (and if you read this blog, you likely are,) I can't really think of a better analogue for the Izzet than their Goblins and Gnomes. Ravnica doesn't have Gnomes, but you can certainly make a Goblin character who fits in here.

The Izzet are one of two super-science guilds in Ravnica. But while the Simic Combine focuses on biomancy, the Izzet are arguably the more conventional of the two, being interested in magic and technology and the intersection between the two. Discovery and experimentation are their greatest ideals, and they place a very high value on intelligence.

More than any of the other guilds, the Izzet guildmaster (and parun, meaning its founder, which puts his age at over 10,000) is central to the identity of the guild. Niv-Mizzet, a red and blue dragon who is also a wizard, is extremely egotistical, but he is smart enough that the ego is sort of justified. He is constantly working on myriad projects, and only he can keep the details of them all straight.

In terms of aesthetics, the Izzet are very steampunk, its researchers wearing magitek-like armor and their laboratories all powered by steam vents.

The Izzet are in charge of construction in Ravnica, but their expertise in technology has given the city steam power and heat, and while I don't think it says explicitly, you could even imagine them providing electricity, breaking Ravnica out of the typical medievalism you find in most of the game's settings.

The Izzet are great catalysts for stories because they are always working on some exciting new project, and the possible results of such experimentation is practically limitless. Time travel, planar travel, opening portals to extra-planar threats, all manner of reality-warping, or just plain old explosions that kill you just as dead as anything else can be the result of Izzet experimentation.

But if you want lower-key stuff, you can always look at the practical side of things. Given their projects, the Izzet will probably be a good source for fetch quests - whether it's a one-session adventure that takes you into some mini-dungeon or a campaign-spanning project that requires many rare components.

The Izzet are also susceptible to sabotage, and you could easily have their projects threatened by nefarious individuals, requiring your intrepid adventurers to protect or investigate what has happened.

As villains (and a lot of those campaign-level stories mentioned three paragraphs above could be the result of villainy,) the Izzet are a great mad-scientist kind of guild (though this works just as well for the Simic.) For instance, you could have some Izzet researcher who is balking at a new Azorius regulation limiting his dangerous experiments and decides to just let loose on the city. In fact, this actually would work really well for a superhero/supervillain style narrative (which, come to think of it, would actually work great in Ravnica regardless of which guilds you use...)

An Izzet villain could be intentionally malevolent, but you could also easily have Izzet villains who don't think they're doing anything wrong - they're just so obsessed with getting results from their experiments that they have lost track of any regard for the safety of the citizens.

Wild and unexpected things are likely to happen with the Izzet - as villains or allies. If your party establishes a comfortable home base, an Izzet experiment going wrong could easily allow you to, well, blow it up.

Environments:

As the Red and Blue guild, the Izzet lands are Mountains and Islands. Their mountains are likely massive towers bright with activity - steam and flames bursting out of smokestacks and vents, lightning rods capturing atmospheric electricity, and explosions from the many labs within. Their islands, which in Ravnica tend to be canals, aqueducts, and other waterways, are probably either used for power-generating mills or pumped into their labs to produce steam or cool overheating systems. Indeed, the combination of Red's heat with Blue's water really makes steam a big element of the guild, and their territories are probably cacophonous with all the industrial activity and explosive experimentation.

All right, and with that, we've done the nine guilds of Ravnica! What a journey it's been. Well, the book comes out on Friday in game stores, so until then, we should...

What's that?

There's a tenth guild?

And the public has been aware of them since the first Ravnica block twelve years ago?

Ok then. We'll close things out with my favorite guild, House Dimir.

Golgari Swarm Story Hooks

The guild most affiliated with Ravnica's undercity, the Golgari promise a ton of interesting stories of both a traditional and unconventional nature. Unlike, say, the Rakdos or the Orzhov or the Dimir (the other Black-mana guilds) the Golgari have a very real and very tangible service they provide to the city that is unquestionably indispensable. They get rid of the garbage.

Indeed, garbage disposal as well as corpse disposal is the purview of the Golgari, and in a city where there's nowhere outside the city to get rid of waste, you're not going to ask much about what the Golgari are doing with it.

While all black-mana guilds have some presence down in the undercity, the Golgari really thrive and more or less rule down there. One gets the sense that there is a lot that the Golgari get up to that the rest of the city doesn't know about (though the Dimir are the obvious winners for secret-keeping.) In fact, the Golgari are fractured like the Gruul Clans. But while the Gruul and their values of freedom and independence keep the clans willing to let the others do their own thing, the Golgari is in constant upheaval as lich-lords and gorgons (the Magic, and you know, classical mythology version of gorgons that for some strange reason are called Medusas in D&D because there's a different monster called gorgons) vie for control of the guild, animating zombie armies out of the discarded dead of the city in order to fight over leadership of the guild.

Most Ravnicans stay away from the undercity, and so most adventurers will probably consider any journey down into these ruins and forgotten structures that have successively been built upon as a voyage into a dark and scary unknown.

But while the Golgari might appear sinister, they often act as guides to this underworld, taking people who need to be down there through the maze of tunnels and buried canals where monstrous creatures and roaming zombies threaten to pop out of any corner.

The Golgari might contact a group of adventurers to deal with unusual monsters or humanoid cults and gangs that threaten their operations. Outsiders might also play an important role in settling disputes between factions within the swarm. A politically powerful Golgari druid might need to eliminate some rising necromancer who threatens the peace, but cannot be seen to take a part in their destruction.

The Golgari also recycle organic material in order to provide low-cost food for the poor of Ravnica. While there's definitely some creepy Soylent Green shenanigans going on there, the demand for food in such a massive city must be incredibly high, meaning that Golgari operations have to continue or people could start to starve.

The undercity of Ravnica is basically the plane's equivalent to the Underdark, and between the various factions within the Golgari (not to mention the presence of other guilds down there,) you could easily have an entire campaign set there in which the Golgari play a big role - most of the undercity population centers are under Golgari control.

They can serve as guides and allies down here, but they can also make for excellent villains.

First off, the Golgari believe that one day, the beings of the undercity will rise up and take over the entire plane. This could mean anything from giant insects to zombie hordes, and likely both. You could easily have a campaign that starts with a descent into the undercity, only for the party to discover that some ambitious Golgari lich is planning to lead an utterly massive horde of zombies and skeletons up to the surface, and the party's job is to try to stop this menace that the people in the surface city have no idea exists.

Indeed, any time you want to throw in some undead creatures, you can have the intra-guild Golgari conflict spill out into the surface world.

The Golgari are great "strange bedfellows" NPCs - allowing a good party to work alongside them even if they're really uncomfortable doing so.

Environment:

As the Green and Black guild, your lands are Forests and Swamps. The "swamps" (represented in Ravnica by underground sewers) will probably dominate the type of territory you think of with the Golgari, but they do have some territory above ground. However, these "forests" are probably not the manicured parks of the Selesnya or the wild-growth woodlands of the Gruul. Instead, you're probably going to mainly find these around large inlets into the sewers. The Golgari would likely cultivate these forests as gardens and farms, but probably in a very industrial and functional way. You're probably not going to have a pleasant stroll through a Golgari forest, but you might be able to pick up fresh vegetables! And maybe some meat from a giant insect!

Zandalari Warlocks Out, Kul Tiran Mages In

Whether it was a response to feedback or simply oversights on the part of the team, the announced classes for the upcoming allied races were revised.

Zandalari Trolls no longer have access to Warlocks. The argument is that Zandalar never really had access to fel magic. I'm not sure I totally buy that - Warlocks are generally not something a culture as a whole pursues, but is more of an individual's choice. On the other hand, Warlocks are not terribly wanting for race representation. But I don't think they needed to get rid of them.

Kul Tiran Humans will, as it turns out, get access to mages. While the post points out that they don't have a strong arcane tradition (I guess they really are just priests and shamans among the Tidesages) there's obviously one very prominent Kul Tiran mage, and so it makes sense that, especially given her ascendence from pariah to leader, the Kul Tirans might start studying arcane magic.

I'll still contend that Kul Tirans ought to have access to Paladins, though I suppose there's some logic to the notion that their priests are really more about the animistic/shamanistic view of the ocean rather than worship of the Light. I still think the Order of Embers is exactly the sort of organization that should be producing paladins (and if we start getting class-themed gear again I'd love to see a dark "burn the witches" style paladin set,) but you can't win them all.

For the fun of it, let's do a race/class combo count! (I'm counting Pandaren separately when it comes to factions rather than double-listing them.)

Warrior: 21 total, 10 Alliance, 10 Horde, 1 Pandaren (Warriors are easy to count.)

Paladin: 8 total, 5 Alliance, 3 Horde (given the events of Legion, I'm really wondering when the hell we're going to get Night Elf Paladins - we got two NE class champions and not a single dwarf!)

Death Knight: 12 total, 6 Alliance, 6 Horde (and until they change the starting experience, probably never getting more)

Hunter: 21 total, 10 Alliance, 10 Horde, 1 Pandaren (I think every allied race can be them, and with gnomes added in Legion they're just as universal as warriors.)

Shaman: 12 total, 4 Alliance, 7 Horde, 1 Pandaren

Rogue: 17 total, 8 Alliance, 8 Horde, 1 Pandaren (With a base race and allied race on both side for hooved people, it's an even split among those who don't clomp around.)

Druid: 7 total, 3 Alliance, 4 Horde (Horde gets more, but it's just two sets of related races, whereas the Alliance has more varied Druids.)

Monk: 18 total, 8 Alliance, 9 Horde, 1 Pandaren (for some reason Monk skills are apparently very easy to pick up, I guess. Or perhaps it's just a less popular class and they don't want to put a lot of restrictions on it.)

Demon Hunter: 2 total, 1 Alliance, 1 Horde (another hero class, this would probably be hard to add new races to.)

Warlock: 12 total, 6 Alliance, 6 Horde (an even split, now that Zandalari don't get them.)

Mage: 10 Alliance, 8 Horde, 1 Pandaren (Tauren seem to be the only ones to shun arcane magic.)

Priest: 10 Alliance, 9 Horde, 1 Pandaren (the Highmountain don't have Sunwalkers, so no priests nor paladins.)

Assuming I got the counts right, this means that the Alliance has 81 total race/class combinations (or 88 if you count the Pandaren) and the Horde has 81 as well (again, 88 if you count Pandaren.)

Well, that looks pretty balanced, and probably intentional. I suspect that the rearrangements of classes might have been meant to balance these numbers (again, assuming I counted correctly.) I think that flavor should be the first consideration, but I also understand Blizzard's desire to appear evenhanded between the factions on such fundamental gameplay matters (can the Alliance get some inner conflict that the Horde has to worry about for a change?)

Even though we're twelve years past Paladins and Shamans being exclusive to one or the other faction (at least until Classic goes live,) I still do feel that the Alliance ought to have greater access to Paladins and the Horde should have more Shamans, and that holds true. Druids used to be the class that was very carefully balanced between the factions, but this is an area where they really have gone more with flavor than balance, and that's fine. Those dinosaur forms are very cool and all, but I am so excited about the terrifying wicker beasts the Kul Tirans get that it makes up for having one fewer Druid race.