Tuesday, November 6, 2018

Cult of Rakdos Story Hooks

The Cult of Rakdos is really fun, and certainly the most over-the-top guild in Ravnica. This is a guild of demented circus performers who rather frequently kill themselves as part of the act, and also sometimes kill the audience as part of the act. It's insane, and might stretch some of the believability of the world even in this thoroughly fantasy setting.

I think the first thing to remember with this guild is to keep a sense of humor. On the other hand, if you lean into the horror of it, it can be quite terrifying.

That the Cult of Rakdos presents potential villains for your campaign should, I hope, be immediately obvious. It's a cult to a demon lord, after all.

But what's fascinating about it and its role in the setting is that there's room in the Rakdos guild for good people.

Rakdos is the only guild that is committed to entertainment and the arts. While the blood-soaked "the first two rows will get wet" style of performance is something they're known for, Rakdos also provides many lower-key forms of entertainment from theater to music to acrobatics and other circus types of performance art.

Given Ravnica's easy use of Noir tropes, I imagine that the city's hottest nightclubs and lounges are probably run by Rakdos.

You could easily have a Rakdos circus employ the party to run security at their performances, or have a Rakdos musician task you with finding (or recovering) a magical instrument. If you wanted a legal drama sort of adventure, you could even defend some Rakdos satirist who has been unfairly charged by the Azorius senator whose corruption they were calling out.

But the Rakdos are going to be a lot easier to fit in as villains. While the Gruul are anarchists, the Rakdos are generally nihilists, and some might decide that the medium of their performance art is murder - tracking a Rakdos serial killer could be a good low-level adventure.

The Rakdos can also use the cover of their performances to act as assassins, and you might uncover a plot to take out some important individual that the party needs to prevent.

At the campaign level, one should consider that the cult aspect of the guild is that they are all trying to create a performance that will garner the attention of the endlessly bored demon lord Rakdos himself. A truly dedicated and mad cultist might, for example, try to sabotage some Izzet experiment in an attempt to blow up the entire tenth district, all just to make sure that Rakdos notices them.

And naturally, if Rakdos himself is roused from his apathetic doldrums, the result would almost certainly be a massive riot swarming with demons and cultists and basically look like Ravnica's version of the Purge. We do have the stat blocks for all the guild leaders, so a final fight against Rakdos could be a great campaign-capper.

Environments:

As the Black and Red guild, the lands are Swamps and Mountains. Swamps in Ravnica generally refer to the sewers and undercity, and I think that deep pits where Rakdos torturers and cultists can hide from the eye of the law make sense as their territory. As by far the kinkiest guild, there's definitely a dungeon-in-the-traditional-sense feel to some of their underground locations, with a fire-and-brimstone aesthetic. They likely exist within rather than on top of Ravnica's mountains - which are largely just old ruined towers and such. Still, a grand performance on the side of a mountain (likely with lots of fireworks) would fit them quite well.

Their circuses likely travel around a lot, meaning that the Rakdos guild spends a lot of time in other guilds' territories to entertain the masses. I think that a Rakdos circus coming to the neighborhood is a really good way to kick off an adventure, especially if something goes horribly wrong (or horribly right) in the performance.

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