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.
No comments:
Post a Comment