Gruul Clans Story Hooks

Nine of the ten guilds are pretty comfortable with the fact that Ravnica is just one big city. The Gruul are emphatically not. But to say that the Gruul are any one thing is itself a violation of their anarchic, chaotic philosophy. It's the Gruul Clans, not the Gruul Clan, and that means that you never know exactly what you're dealing with when it comes to the Gruul.

The Gruul territories are where the city has fallen into disrepair. Perhaps the most outcast of all the guilds, they don't believe that authority comes from laws or traditions, but instead that it comes from might.

Generally I think most non-Gruul characters would probably feel hesitant about entering Gruul territories. This is the closest that Ravnica comes to wilderness, and the Gruul are the world's barbarian hordes, but also its gangs and anarchists.

The Gruul present one of the most obvious story hooks - the players could be sent out into Gruul territory to search for a person or thing that has been lost in Gruul territory. Navigating inter-clan politics and dealing with brutes who might attack you for no other reason than to prove their might, it's in Gruul lands that the comforts of civilization break down.

Indeed, one of the unusual things about the Ravnica setting is the way that players are likely going to be primarily adventuring in areas that are familiar to them - you might delve into a Lich's dungeon one afternoon and then just walk a couple miles back to your apartment that night to sleep off what was probably a very long day.

But the Gruul potentially provide an exception to that, and going into the wilds might give you a bit of a more classic D&D experience.

Still, the thing is that the Gruul don't live in true wilderness. In reality, their territories are ruins - parts of the city that have either fallen to their anarchy or were simply abandoned at some point and claimed by Gruul squatters.

Given its decidedly non-uniform nature, it's very easy for players to be allied with some Gruul while they fight against others. In terms of inter-guild conflict, the Gruul are going to be powerful allies if you find yourself in conflict with the "establishment" guilds like the Boros, Azorius, or Orzhov. The Gruul clans value freedom above all else, and in a dense city like Ravnica, they might be the right people to strike back at oppression.

But, of course, their opposition to civilization might be a threat to the safety of Ravnica's people. One of the benefits of a civilization is that the strong protect the weak (or at least are supposed to.) Gruul's philosophy that might makes right means that the innocent civilians of Ravnica would be in their crosshairs.

Aesthetically, the fact that they aren't truly in the wild lends to a really good punk/Mad Max look to them. You might have a troll that wields a maul made out of a chunk of crumbled stonework, for example.

In terms of low-key Gruul adventures, one interesting aspect to the guild is that they are the demolitionists of Ravnica. A Gruul representative might have adventurers clear out an abandoned building before they take it down.

For larger stories, even potentially campaign-defining ones, while the Clans are generally little more than gangs that squabble with one another in their own areas, if someone charismatic and strong enough to unite them, like the cyclops Borborygmos (guild leader last time I checked,) they could very suddenly become a massive threat to the rest of the city, requiring mobilization to push them back into their lands.

Environments:

As the Green and Red guild, Gruul territories are going to be Forests and Mountains. While a lot of forests in Ravnica are really more like city parks, the Gruul ones are more likely to be made up of trees growing naturally in the ruins of old districts, and thus can probably be a more wild and harder to navigate area. Their mountains would probably be more like tall, abandoned towers perhaps with magical lava conjured up from the heart of the world or left over from forges or other fiery facilities.

The land is very important to the Gruul, and as I've discussed a lot in this post, their territory is going to feel different than the rest of the city. That feeling of both wilderness and Mad Max-style ruinscape can be a big change of pace from the rest of Ravnica.