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.
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